THE CEO's REGRET

CHAPTER 16: PIECES

My mother knew before I ever told Sebastian I was carrying his child, someone had already handed her a reason to let him go. I didn’t sleep that night.

I just lay there on my back in the dark, staring at the ceiling, letting the truth settle over me. No fighting it, no trying to organize it into neat little boxes, just letting it land. My mother, a forged document, a man who had decided how everyone else’s story would end before they even realized they were part of the game.

She was gone. Two years now, whatever she had thought, whatever reasons she had given herself for staying quiet, whatever love had kept her from speaking up until the very end, that had all disappeared with her.

I would never get to ask her why. I would never hear her voice explaining it. All I had left was the outline of what had been done to her, the ache of knowing she had loved me deeply and still chosen silence, and the sad realization that love and wisdom were never quite the same thing.

Victor Hale hadn’t just ripped Sebastian and me apart. He played all three of us at once. Me, Sebastian, my mother. Three separate lies timed perfectly so none of us could compare notes. Like chess pieces moved by a man who had already decided he was the only one allowed to win.

By three in the morning, the sharp grief had cooled into something colder and clearer. The kind of quiet resolve that comes when you finally see the whole trap that was built around you…and start thinking, very quietly, about what you’re going to do next.

I was up at six. Coffee made. I kissed Isla gently on the forehead while she was still half-asleep. I drove to work and was sitting at my desk by eight, ready.

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The planning meeting started at ten. Sebastian was already there when I walked in, standing by the window with his phone, the way he always did when he showed up early and didn’t know what else to do with himself. He looked up the second I stepped into the room. Something quick and unguarded crossed his face before the professional mask clicked back into place.

“Good morning,” he said, then glanced back down at his notes.

I sat down, opened my folder, and looked at him differently, not softly. This wasn’t some sudden wave of forgiveness or anything easy like that, but for the first time, I saw the full picture instead of the one I’d been carrying around for years.

A man who had been lied to by his own father. Controlled from the time he was a kid by someone who mistook control for love and handed a fake document at the worst possible moment, believed it for less than a day, and then lived in the wreckage of that one awful twenty-four hours for sixteen long years.

He was played, and so was I and my mother. Victor Hale had moved every one of us like pieces on a board he had built long before any of us even sat down at the table.

I watched Sebastian across the meeting table, and, for the first time, I didn’t see the man who had left me at the altar. I saw someone who had been deceived just as badly as I was, only from the inside, which somehow hurt worse because it had come wrapped in the word “family.”

Patricia ran the meeting. I spoke when I needed to. Sebastian asked sharp, focused questions, and I answered them. We stayed professional, efficient, and careful. Nothing we said had anything to do with the real weight hanging in the air between us, but I was aware of him now in a quieter way. Not the sharp, defensive tension of the last few weeks. Something closer to understanding.

And I didn’t know what to do with that yet.

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The room cleared out at eleven-forty. Patricia left first, then the junior staff, the door clicking shut softly behind the last person.

Sebastian didn’t head for the exit. “Can you stay?” he asked.

It wasn’t really a question, and it wasn’t quite a request. Just the low, steady voice of a man who had something heavy he needed to get out and had been waiting for the room to empty.

I stayed. He didn’t sit down. Instead, he reached into the folder in front of him and slid a slim stack of plain printed pages across the table toward me, no fancy letterhead, no title, just the pages.

“I need to show you something,” he said, his voice tight with the effort of keeping it steady.

I looked at the document but didn’t reach for it yet.

“My father had you followed.” He paused, his jaw tightening. “Not recently. Four years ago.” Another beat. “He hired a private investigator. Full report…your address, your workplace, Isla’s school.” His throat worked visibly. “Photographs.”

A cold shiver slid through my chest.

“I found out last week,” he went on. “Not from him. From the investigator himself, the guy apparently had a conscience and was retiring.” Sebastian’s eyes held mine, raw and direct. “I came to you the moment I knew. I need you to understand that.”

“Four years ago,” I said, my voice level even as my pulse hammered. “He found us four years ago.”

“Yes.”

“He knew Isla existed?.”

“Yes.”

“And he told you nothing.”

The word came out of him like it had been carved out. “Nothing.”

I stared at the folder lying between us on the table. Isla at twelve, standing outside her school. Being photographed by a stranger her own grandfather had paid for. Victor Hale reading those pages, looking at her face, then filing the report away somewhere and saying nothing, for four whole years.

I thought about what kind of man could make a choice like that. I already knew I had known since the envelope showed up in the lobby. Since the forged signature, and since Ethan’s quiet voice on the phone told me my mother had been shown a lie before I’d even told Sebastian the truth.

Victor Hale didn’t just want to win. He needed everyone around him to lose. I reached across the table and pulled the folder toward me.