THE CEO's REGRET

CHAPTER 12: DARK PROVISION

Marcus left me alone with it. He closed his laptop, said “take the document, call me when you're ready,” and walked out without asking a single question I wasn't prepared to answer.

That was the thing about Marcus, he always knew the difference between a moment that needed talking through and one that needed to be survived quietly. He got it right every time.

I spread the documents across my desk and read them slowly, then again. Then a third time, because the second time hadn't made it any easier to hold.

Legitimate, fully funded, untouched from the day it was opened. Three pages of clean, expensive legal work sitting quietly in the financial system for sixteen years like something that had been patiently waiting.

Certain it would eventually be found.

Set up two months after Sebastian's wedding. Two months after I had walked away from that church and taken a bus to my mother's house and sat at her kitchen table saying “I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm completely fine,” while something inside me was breaking in a way I wouldn't fully understand for years.

I was three months pregnant. I had told no one. I had been so certain that alone was the only direction left, and someone… someone had known about Isla before she had a name.

The thought hit me somewhere behind the ribs and stayed there, aching.

I traced the attorney's name on the third page with one finger without meaning to. A cross-reference with the subcontractor documents Marcus had flagged showed a connection. A shared registration address, one name appearing in both filing histories. The name was Ethan Cross.

Not directly. Not in a way that was meant to be found easily. But there, if you were looking closely enough and angry enough to keep going.

Which meant Ethan had arranged this. Or been the bridge between someone who needed it arranged and a lawyer discreet enough to do it without leaving obvious tracks.

Someone had tried to provide for my daughter in the dark while I had been raising her in the light, alone, without a single person to carry it with me.

I sat with that for a long time. The documents blurred slightly at the edges and I let them, just for a moment, before I folded them, put them in my bag, and drove home.

------

The apartment felt too large without Isla in it. She was at a friend's place for the evening, and I was grateful and I also wasn't, because silence that size had a way of turning on you when your defences were already thin.

I made dinner out of habit. I ate maybe four bites, then sat at the kitchen table with a glass of water and the particular, hollowed-out feeling of a woman who had held herself together all day and finally ran out of places to put the rest of it.

The memory came somewhere around nine. I didn't invite it. It didn't ask.

Suddenly I was twenty years old, sitting on the floor of his apartment with my back against the sofa, the television off, the kind of late-night quiet that made people say things they'd been carrying without knowing it.

He said, “I think about what kind of father I'd be.”

I asked him what he meant by that. He was quiet for a moment, looking up at the ceiling with that particular expression he got when he was reaching for something real.

“I just want them to know they were chosen. Not accidental or something I tolerated. Actually, deliberately chosen.” He turned his head and looked at me directly. “The way some people choose each other.”

Something had moved through me so quietly and so completely that it frightened me.

I was twenty years old and I had not yet learned to be careful with things that felt that permanent. I had looked at him and thought, *I would walk through anything for you.* And I had meant it the way you only meant things before the world had a chance to show you what meaning them actually cost.

Present-day me pressed the heel of my hand against my chest and held it there.

Someone had set up a trust for a child he didn't officially know existed. A man who had once said he wanted his children to know they were chosen.

I sat at that table in the quiet of my empty apartment and let that sit inside me without trying to shape it into something manageable. It didn't feel like forgiveness. It didn't feel like anger either. It felt like a door I hadn't known was there, opening onto a room I wasn't sure I was ready to walk into.

----

My phone rang at eight forty-three the next morning.

I was in my car, two minutes from the office, coffee cooling in the cupholder, mind already sorting through the day ahead. I answered without checking the screen, a reflex, a mistake, the kind of small carelessness that changed the entire shape of a morning.

"Ms. Reed." The voice stopped me cold.

Controlled and deliberate. The voice of a woman who had spent years being precise about everything, her words, her pauses, the exact temperature she allowed into a sentence. I knew it before she gave me the name.

I pulled to the curb. Put the car in park, my hand tightened around the phone before I told it to.

"This is Claire Sutton-Hale." A beat. Measured. "I apologize for calling directly. I'll be brief."

Outside, a woman walked past with a coffee. A van pulled out of a side road. The city went about its morning completely unbothered by the fact that Sebastian Hale's wife was in my ear twenty-four hours after I'd found a document that almost nobody should have known existed.

"I know about the trust account," Claire said.

She let the silence after it do its work. She was good at that.

"I know quite a lot of things," she continued, her voice dropping slightly, not softer, just more direct, like she was setting something down between us rather than delivering it.

"Things I think you've deserved to have for a long time." She paused. "I'm not asking for your trust. I haven't earned it. I'm only asking for one hour."

My throat tightened. "How do you know about the trust ?" I said.

A breath. The smallest fracture in all that composure, there and gone in under a second, but I heard it.

"Because I was there," she said quietly, "when it was decided."

The street outside went slightly soft at the edges.

Sixteen years. That account had existed for sixteen years, and this woman had known about it since the beginning, and she was on my phone the morning after I found it like she had been waiting for exactly this call.

"Please." The word came out differently. Unpolished, unguarded, stripped of everything she had kept so carefully in place until that moment.

Like it had escaped before she could manage it back down. "Let me buy you lunch."