Triplets For The Cold-Hearted CEO

Where Are You

Chapter Seventeen

David walked in just after midnight. He did not look like a man who had been searching for anyone. His jacket was loose, his pace unhurried, and when he saw Emma and her mother still sitting in the living room he stopped only briefly before stepping further inside, dropping his keys on the console table the way he always did, like a man arriving home from an ordinary evening.

"It's late. Why are you both still awake?"

Emma did not answer that. She had not been sitting there for two hours to talk about the time.

"Did you find them?"

He looked at her with the kind of patience that had always made her feel like a child asking the wrong question. "I lost track of them but don't worry sweetheart. They won't hide forever."

He smiled when he said it. Showing his full set teeth.

Emma watched him. She had known her father long enough to know when he was performing, and he was performing now. The steadiness in his voice, the casual shrug of his shoulders, the way he looked just past her face rather than directly into her eyes. All of it was theatre. She had grown up watching him do this to other people and she had spent most of her adult life telling herself she was different, that he was honest with her at least, that whatever he did out there he came home and told her the truth.

She did not believe that anymore.

She wanted to be wrong. She had been telling herself all evening that maybe she was reading too much into things, that she was tired and scared and letting it colour everything she saw.

But standing here now, watching him settle into the armchair and reach for the television remote with the ease of a man who had achieved exactly what he set out to do tonight, she could not make herself believe it. He had not been looking for those children. She did not know what he had been doing but it was not that.

"It's fine," she said. "You don't need to worry about it."

"Emma." His voice took on that gentle, firm quality she had grown up fearing, the one that sounded like patience but wasn't. "You worry too much. Trust your father. I will find out where she is. In the meantime focus on your husband and your child. Stop sneaking out at night. You don't want Nathan asking questions about where you've been, do you.”

It was not really a question. She recognised that too.

She nodded once. "Mom, can we talk inside?"

Linda followed her to the room without a word.

Emma closed the door behind them both and turned around.

"What is it?" Linda asked.

"Mom, what if those children are Sarah's kids?"

Linda's expression did not change immediately. She tilted her head slightly. "What do you mean? Sarah gave birth to one child."

"I never checked. I never went back to confirm anything and now I can't find those doctors anywhere. The hospital has no record of them."

Emma kept her voice low. "Alex kept calling Sarah mom from the hospital, From the moment he laid eyes on her. And then a child with a striking resemblance to Nathan turns up alongside him out of nowhere. And today I almost had them. I was that close. A woman came to pick them up from school and I followed her but my car broke down on the road.”

Linda was quiet.

"I have been going over it all night," Emma continued. "What if Sarah delivered Triplets and someone helped her hide them? Because the way Alex responded to that girl was not the way children behave with strangers. It was recognition. It was the way you act when you already know someone and you are just relieved to have found them again."

Linda moved to the edge of the bed and sat down. The room was quiet enough that Emma could hear the television from the living room, the low indistinct murmur of whatever her father had switched on now that the conversation out there was finished as far as he was concerned.

"If Nathan finds out about any of this…

"I know what it means."

"Then you know we cannot afford to be careless." Linda folded her hands in her lap.

When she looked up her expression had settled into something flat and certain, the same look Emma had seen on her face years ago in a hospital corridor when a decision had been made and carried through and never spoken of again. "Nathan is not going to find out. I will handle it. And if those children are Sarah's, then I will make sure they do not live long enough for any of this to become a problem."

Emma did not respond. She stood in the middle of the room and sald nothing at all.

It was only after Linda had gotten up, adjusted her clothes, and walked back out to the living room that Emma sat down slowly on the edge of the bed. She pressed both palms flat against her knees and stared at the floor. She had started all of this wanting to protect what was hers…

She had told herself that every step of the way, that everything she had done and everything she had allowed to be done had been in service of something worth protecting.

So she wasn't going to allow some rumours and her sister ruined it for her she had done worst in the last to be here and she would do more to remain there.

Her phone buzzed interrupting her thoughts. When she looked at it it was Nathan

Her heart skipped for a second, because Nathan wasn't the type to message or even call her for the tears she had stayed with them.

“Where are you”