SIX YEARS TOO LATE

Chapter Two: The Reception

Ashworth House smelled like it always had, lemon oil and old wood and, underneath that, the particular cold mustiness of rooms too large for the number of people who lived in them. Iris stood just inside the double doors of the front parlor with a glass of white wine she had no intention of drinking, watching black-clad mourners drift between the hors d'oeuvres and the portrait gallery like they were browsing a museum, and thought: this house was never going to let me leave quietly.

Caleb had found the one interesting thing in a room full of adults making careful conversation, a grandfather clock in the corner, taller than he was, its pendulum swinging with a weight and patience that seemed to fascinate him more than anything else all day. He'd been standing in front of it for six minutes. Iris knew because she'd been counting, the way she counted everything about him in unfamiliar rooms, proximity, exits, how many strangers stood between them.

"He does that," said a voice at her elbow, and Iris turned to find Richard Sullivan closer than she'd realized, his eyes on Caleb rather than her. "Fixates. Vivian used to do the same thing with the piano when she was small. Eleanor said it ran in the family."

"I wouldn't know what runs in the family," Iris said. "I've been gone six years."

It came out harder than she meant it to. Richard didn't flinch, he never flinched, that was the thing about her father, he absorbed things the way stone absorbed rain, slowly and without visible damage, but something in his jaw tightened.

"You look well," he said instead. "Motherhood suits you."

"Don't."

"I'm not trying to start anything, Iris." He glanced toward the parlor doors, toward the crowd, lowering his voice the way he used to when he was about to say something he didn't want overheard at the dinner table. "I only want to say, you should think carefully about how long you stay in this town."

Iris turned to face him fully. "Is that a threat?"

"It's a kindness." His eyes found hers, and for just a moment there was something in them she hadn't expected, not anger, not the cold disapproval she'd braced for since the letter arrived. Something closer to fear. "There are things in motion here that have nothing to do with you or that boy, and I would very much like to keep it that way. Take the inheritance, if that's what Eleanor wanted. Sign whatever Marcus puts in front of you. And then take your son and go home."

"This is my home."

"No," Richard said, quiet and immediate, like he'd been waiting six years to correct her on exactly that point. "It stopped being your home the day you left it. I'd like it to stay that way, for your sake."

He walked off before she could answer, back toward a cluster of Ashworth Corp board members near the fireplace, leaving Iris standing alone with a wine glass she still hadn't touched and a sentence that sat in her chest like a swallowed stone. For your sake. Not for his. Not for the family's. For hers.

She was still turning it over when she felt someone else approaching, and didn't need to look to know who.

"He's not wrong to be scared," Ethan said, low, close, coming to stand beside her at an angle that put his back to the room, shielding whatever they said from anyone reading lips across the parlor. Six years, and he still did that, positioned himself like a man used to protecting information, patient charts, bad news. "Whatever you think about me, whatever you think happened, you should listen to him about that much."

"I'm not taking advice from either of you." Iris kept her eyes on Caleb, on the clock, on anything that wasn't Ethan Hayes's face at close range. "I came for a will reading. I'm leaving after."

"Iris."

"Don't."

"I need to ask you something and I need you to actually answer it this time." His voice had dropped further, rough at the edges in a way that made her chest ache despite six years of very deliberate practice at not letting it. "How old is he?"

"He's six," she said, because it was a fact, because facts couldn't be argued with the way feelings could. "He turned six in March."

She watched him do the math again, the same way he had in the church, and this time he didn't have the excuse of shock to hide behind. His mouth opened and then closed. When he spoke again his voice had gone thin, careful, like a man walking across ice he already suspected wouldn't hold.

"Six years in March," he said. "You left in, Iris, you left in October, six years ago. That's—"

"That's math you're capable of doing yourself." She finally looked at him, and hated how much it cost her to keep her voice even. "You don't get to do this here. You don't get to do this at all, actually, but you especially don't get to do it at your fiancée's grandmother's funeral, in a room full of people who'll be talking about it by dinner."

"I'm not trying to embarrass you."

"You're succeeding anyway."

"I need to know if he's mine." He said it plainly, none of the careful hedging he'd used a moment ago, and something in the directness of it landed harder than anything softer could have. "Iris. Please. I have spent six years trying to understand what happened to us, and I am asking you one simple question, and I need you to give me the truth even if you hate me. Especially if you hate me."

Across the room, the clock chimed the half hour, a low resonant sound that seemed to physically move through the floor, and Caleb turned from it at last, scanning the crowd until he found his mother, the way he always did in rooms full of strangers, checking, recalibrating, making sure the one fixed point in his world hadn't moved. His eyes landed on Ethan next to her and stayed there a beat too long, that same assessing look he'd given the man in the church.

"I'm not doing this today," Iris said, and turned to go find her son, and Ethan's hand closed, gently, but immovably, around her wrist.

"Iris."

"Let go of me."

"I paid for a paternity test," he said, so quiet it was barely more than breath, and the words hit her like cold water. "Six months ago. Discreetly. Through my own resources, nobody else knows, not Vivian, not your father, nobody. I found you both eighteen months ago and I didn't know how to approach you, and I—" He stopped himself, visibly, physically reining something in. "I know, Iris. I already know. I've known for six months. I'm asking you to say it out loud because I need to hear you say it, because I have spent six years believing you left because of something I did, and I need, I need one true thing between us before this town tears both of us apart again."

The room seemed to tilt very slightly around her, the way it had in the church, and for one long moment Iris couldn't find a single word in her whole vocabulary that felt safe to say. He knew. He'd known for six months and said nothing, watched her walk into a church today and let her believe she still had the upper hand of a secret, and some old, exhausted, six-years-guarded part of her wanted to scream at him for that alone, for taking even this from her, the choosing of when and how to tell him.

"Why didn't you say anything," she managed. "Six months. You had six months and you—"

"Because I didn't know how to find the right moment to destroy both our lives," Ethan said, and there was something raw and unguarded in his face now, something she hadn't let herself look at directly in six years for exactly this reason, because it still worked on her, even now, even furious. "And then your grandmother died, and Marcus called, and suddenly there wasn't a right moment left to wait for."

"Ethan." Vivian's voice, from the doorway, bright and slightly too loud, the way it got when she'd noticed something and decided the safest response was cheerfulness. "There you are, Gerald's asking for you, something about the foundation gala committee, he says it can't wait—" Her eyes moved from Ethan's face to Iris's, to the space between them, to Ethan's hand still loosely circled around Iris's wrist, and Iris watched her sister's expression do the complicated thing again, the flicker of calculation behind careful composure. "Am I interrupting something?"

"No," Iris said, pulling her wrist free at last, stepping back, putting a full arm's length of Ashworth parlor air between herself and a man she had promised herself, for six years, she would never stand this close to again. "Ethan was just leaving."

She didn't wait to see whether he did. She crossed the room to Caleb, put a hand on his shoulder, and steered him toward the clock's corner window as though checking on him were the only reason she'd moved at all, as though her heart weren't slamming against her ribs, as though six years of careful distance hadn't just cracked clean down the middle in front of half the founding families of Ashworth Falls.

"Mom." Caleb tipped his head up at her, that flat assessing look again, filing something away. "Is that man my dad?"

Iris's whole body went still.

"Why would you ask that?"

"Because he looked at me the way you look at the picture in your desk drawer," Caleb said, matter-of-fact, the way he said everything, no idea at all what the words did to the air around them. "The one you think I don't know about. And because Aunt Vivian's face did the thing it does when she's about to cry but isn't going to."

Before Iris could find any answer at all, true or otherwise, a hand landed lightly on her shoulder from behind, warm and familiar-smelling, and Gerald Whitfield's voice arrived close to her ear, pitched low and pleasant, for her alone.

"Iris, dear. I wonder if I might borrow you for just a moment. There's something about your grandmother's estate I think you'll want to hear before Marcus reads the will tomorrow, something rather important, about your son's inheritance in particular." His smile didn't waver, but his grip on her shoulder tightened, almost imperceptibly, guiding her a step away from Caleb before she'd agreed to move at all. "Somewhere private, if you don't mind. I'd hate for this to be overheard."