Chapter 3: Someone’s Waiting
1253 Words
Marcus placed the report on Julian’s desk at seven fifty-one in the morning.
Julian didn’t look up from his screen. “Medical records?”
“Nothing.” Marcus’s voice was carefully neutral. The tone he reserved for news that required delivering carefully. “Her UK history begins eight years ago. Before that, it’s as if she didn’t exist.”
Julian finally looked up.
“The school emergency contact card,” Marcus continued, sliding a single printed page across the glass surface. “Standard intake form. Blood type, emergency contacts, allergy information.”
Julian looked at the page.
AB negative.
The room went very still.
He had known his own blood type since he was nineteen, sitting in a white clinic chair while a nurse looked up from his file with the particular expression of someone who had found something unexpected. This is quite rare, she’d said. Less than one percent of the population.
He stared at the two letters on the page for a long moment.
Then he set it face-down on the desk.
“Clear my ten o’clock,” he said. “And get me a meeting with Jane Li. This morning.”
Marcus paused at the door. “She may decline.”
“She won’t be given the option.”
——
He was right.
Jane didn’t decline. She was not permitted to.
Julian had gone directly to her project lead, a thoroughly intimidated man named Tom who had practically vibrated with relief at the chance to please him, and by nine fifteen, Jane Li was being ushered into the small glass-walled meeting room on the fourth floor.
She walked in and stopped when she saw him.
Just for a fraction of a second. Just long enough for Julian to catch it.
She recovered quickly. She was always quick. She set her laptop and folders on the table, pulled out the chair across from him, and sat with the efficient composure of a woman who had spent years practising how to be untouchable.
Julian said nothing. He let the silence do the work.
“Tom said this was about the offshore account discrepancies,” Jane said. Her voice was professional.
“Sit down, Jane.”
“I am sitting.”
“Then stop organising your folders.”
Her hands stilled. A small muscle moved in her jaw.
She looked up.
And that was when he saw it.
His gaze dropped, almost involuntarily, to her left wrist, to the thin band of pale green jade resting against her pulse point. The surface had the soft, worn lustre that only came from years of wear.
He recognised it instantly.
The bracelet had been his grandmother’s. A matching pair. He had given Jane one of them the night before her final postgraduate exam, pressing it into her palm in the dark hallway outside her apartment, saying something unbearably earnest that he no longer allowed himself to remember.
He was still wearing his own. Or rather, he had been. Until the day he’d stopped being able to look at it.
Jane had kept hers.
For ten years, she had kept hers.
The professional mask she wore was so precise, so seamlessly constructed, that he had almost believed it. He had almost believed that the woman who had walked into that boardroom yesterday was a stranger. A composed, formidable stranger who had simply borrowed Jane Li’s face.
She was Jane. And she was still wearing his grandmother’s jade.
“You kept it,” he said.
The words came out quieter than he intended.
Jane’s eyes dropped to her wrist. Something shifted in her face, a flash of something raw, immediately suppressed. Her fingers moved instinctively to cover it, then stopped. As if she’d caught herself in the act.
“It’s a bracelet,” she said.
“It’s my bracelet.” He paused. “Or rather—it was.”
The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room.
Jane lifted her chin. “Was there something you needed to discuss about the offshore accounts, Mr. Sinclair?”
He ignored that entirely.
“The boy,” Julian said. “Leo.”
Jane’s expression didn’t change. That was the most telling thing about it. She had prepared for this. She had been preparing for this since the moment she’d walked into the boardroom and seen his face.
“What about him?”
“Who is his father?”
She held his gaze. Her hands were perfectly still on the table, her body was doing the thing it always did around him.
“That,” she said, very quietly, “is none of your business.”
“Jane—”
“It is none of your business.”
There was no anger in it. That was almost worse. Anger would have been a reaction. What she gave him was something colder and more deliberate: a door, locked, with no handle on his side.
Julian leaned forward. “Your medical records don’t exist before eight years ago.”
Something moved across her face.
“People are allowed to have privacy,” she said.
“People are.” He kept his voice level. “You are. But when a child appears out of nowhere with no documented history, no paternity record, and a blood type that is rare—” He stopped.
He didn’t finish the sentence.
He didn’t need to.
Jane stared at him. The fluorescent light above them buzzed its cold, merciless frequency. Outside the glass walls, the open-plan office moved and hummed with ordinary life.
In here, everything had stopped.
“Leo,” she finally said, “is my son.”
“I’m not disputing that.”
“Then we have nothing further to discuss.”
She gathered her folders.
Her movements were precise. A masterclass in performed composure that Julian had watched her construct in real time, layer by careful layer.
She stood.
“Jane.”
She didn’t stop.
“Jane.” Julian said, “If you walk out of this room, I will find out anyway. You know I will.”
She paused at the door. Her back was to him. He could see the line of her spine, the rigid and controlled set of her shoulders.
“Then find out,” she said.
She pushed the door open and walked out.
——
It was raining by the time Jane reached the street.
Julian watched from the fourth-floor window as she appeared at the building’s entrance below. She didn’t run. She walked out into the rain with her laptop bag over her shoulder and her face turned slightly away from the wind.
A black car was already waiting.
The driver had the door open before she reached the kerb. It wasn’t a company car. Julian had memorised the plates of every vehicle in the firm’s fleet during his first walkthrough of the building. This one didn’t belong to any of them.
The man who stepped out of the driver’s side was tall. Broad-shouldered. He handed Jane something, an umbrella. She shook her head. He held it over her anyway.
There was a familiarity in the gesture that sat badly in Julian’s chest.
The man didn’t ask if she needed it. He simply provided it, and Jane didn’t object, which meant she had stopped objecting a long time ago. This was a person who knew exactly how to exist in Jane Li’s orbit without being pushed out of it.
Julian watched the car pull away and disappear into the grey London rain.
- Writer
