Married to my ex

Chapter One: .................. The Call .................. The email had been sitting unread for eleven minutes when Beatrice finally opened it. She'd seen the sender's name flash up during a client call — Winslow & Associates — and spent the rest of the meeting explaining loan covenants while a small, insistent voice asked why a name she didn't recognise had made her stomach drop like that. Alone in her office, blinds half-drawn against the grey afternoon, she read it properly. Dear Ms. Whitfield, My name is Daniel Reyes. I act as personal counsel to Mr. Peter Winslow. Mr. Winslow has instructed me to reach out regarding a matter of a personal and sensitive nature, which he would prefer to discuss in person. He has asked that I extend an invitation to dine with him at his home this Friday evening, at your earliest convenience. There was a phone number. An address in Belgravia that made her eyebrows lift out of pure professional habit. She didn't know a Peter Winslow. And yet a matter of a personal and sensitive nature sat in her chest like a stone dropped into still water. Just call the number, she told herself. She didn't, not yet. She sat very still instead, and let herself think — just for a moment, because the door was shut — about the last time a strange man's name had made the ground tilt like this. She'd been eighteen. It had been Roman's name then. She shut that door quickly, the way she'd trained herself to over five years and two continents, and reached for her phone. Beatrice had built her whole adult life on the principle that the past didn't get a vote. She'd left London at eighteen with a suitcase and a determination that whatever she became next, she'd become it herself — not anyone's leftover. Five years of finance and law had given her exactly what she'd gone looking for: a mind sharp enough that people stopped seeing the girl who'd cried in a car park and started seeing the woman who could dismantle a hostile takeover clause in under a minute. She'd come back to London eight months ago, to a boutique advisory firm, and liked, very specifically, that none of it required anyone's permission — not her aunt's, not her mother's memory, and certainly not Roman Hoxwood's. She had not, in eight months, let herself look up whether he was married. "Ms. Whitfield." Reyes's voice was careful, warm. "I imagine the message was a surprise." "That's one word for it. I don't know Peter Winslow, Mr. Reyes. Unsolicited dinner invitations from strange men's lawyers aren't really something I make a habit of accepting." "That's fair. I can tell you this much: Mr. Winslow believes he may be your biological father." The words landed and didn't, both at once — the way a plate falls, and you know it's already broken before it finishes hitting the floor. "That's a significant claim to make over the phone," she said, when she trusted her voice again. "It is. Which is why he'd like to make it in person. I can tell you he's spent considerable time and resources trying to locate you. Beyond that, I think it should come from him." Beatrice looked out at the cranes moving slowly against the grey sky, and thought of her mother, thin and quiet near the end, saying almost nothing about the man who wasn't on the birth certificate — saying only, once, I did what I had to. You'll understand that, one day, even if you hate me for it right now. She had never hated her mother. She'd spent five years quietly furious at a man she'd never had a face for. Now, apparently, he had a name. An address. A lawyer with a careful voice. "Friday," she said, before she could think better of it. "What time?" Her aunt, when she called, chose her words with unusual care. "Peter Winslow. I only met him the once, years before you were born. Your mother never talked about him — not to me, not to anyone." "Did she love him?" A pause. "That's a question for Friday, love. Not for me." Beatrice didn't push. She'd learned some doors in her family only opened when someone else decided to open them. She told herself, all the way home and all through the week, that this changed nothing. She had a life. A good one, built with her own hands, in rooms Peter Winslow had no part in and knew nothing about. Whatever he wanted — absolution, an heir, a headline — she was under no obligation to give it. She almost believed it by Friday evening, standing in front of her wardrobe choosing something that said I am not remotely nervous about this. She did not let herself think, even once, about the possibility that a man with that much money moved in circles that occasionally, disastrously, overlapped with the Hoxwoods'. She should have. Belgravia on a Friday evening was hushed in the particular way expensive streets always were. The house was tall and lit gold from within, and Beatrice stood outside it longer than she'd meant to, feeling suddenly, absurdly eighteen again — the girl who used to gather her courage on pavements like this one before walking in like she belonged. You belong wherever you decide you belong, she told herself, and rang the bell. A housekeeper showed her through pale marble into a drawing room already half-full of low conversation. It took Beatrice a moment to understand this wasn't the quiet dinner Reyes had described. There were perhaps twenty people here, dressed for something formal, and at the centre of them stood a tall, silver-haired man whose eyes, when they found her, went suddenly, unmistakably bright. This is a party, she thought, unease flickering. This is an announcement. Peter Winslow crossed the room towards her with the urgency of a man who'd waited a long time and could no longer pretend patience. Conversation dimmed as people noticed. "Beatrice." He said her name like he'd practised it. "Thank you for coming." "Mr. Winslow, I think perhaps we should speak privately." "In a moment." He turned slightly to the room, one hand lifting, and the last conversation died into silence. "Forgive the theatre of this — I'm not a patient man, when it comes to this." He looked back at her, tears standing unmistakably in his eyes. "Everyone," he said, his voice carrying easily across the hush, "I'd like you to meet my daughter." For one suspended second, the room was silent enough that Beatrice could hear her own pulse. Then, from near the fireplace, a voice she had spent five years and two continents trying to forget said her name — quiet, disbelieving, unmistakable. She turned, and found Roman Hoxwood staring at her across twenty feet of marble floor as though she were a ghost he hadn't finished burying.