The rest of the ride to the hotel was quiet.
Not the comfortable kind of quiet and not the hostile kind either. Just two people sitting with things too large to make small talk around, watching the city move past the windows.
Julian pulled up outside the ridian, and they got out.
The hotel lobby was cool and marble-floored, the kind of place that slled like fresh flowers and money. Yvette led the way to the lift without being asked, and Julian followed, hands in his pockets, saying nothing.
At the door to her suite, she slid the keycard and pushed it open.
"Co on." She stepped inside and glanced back at him. "I don’t bite." Julian stayed in the doorway.
Yvette looked back at him with a small smile. "Well." She tilted her head. "Not hard."
"Get the baby," Julian said. "And let’s go."
"Whatever," she said, and disappeared inside.
Julian stayed where he was. He leaned against the doorfra, looked down the hallway, and breathed slowly.
In a few minutes, he would be holding his daughter. He would call Amara from the car. He would walk through the door of the Pedro mansion tonight with Justina in his arms, and he would put her in her mother’s hands and watch sothing broken begin, slowly, to be put back together.
He had been holding that image in his mind for weeks.
He held it now.
The door opened wider, and Yvette ca out with the nanny close behind her, and the nanny was holding the baby, small, wrapped in pale yellow, the way newborns always seed slightly too small for the world they’d arrived in.
Julian pushed off the doorfra.
He didn’t plan it. His feet just moved toward her, toward the baby, and his arms ca up, and the nanny, reading the room, transferred the bundle to him without a word.
Julian held her.
She was warm and slight and real in his arms, and for a mont he didn’t do anything except stand there in the hallway of a hotel and look down at her face.
A soft smile arrived on his face without asking permission. The kind that cos from sowhere deeper than thought.
Yvette stood a few feet away, watching him.
Sothing in her expression was hard to na. Not sad exactly. More like the face of a person watching a mont they recognise the importance of, even if they are not inside it.
"Wait," she said quietly. She reached into her bag and pulled out her phone.
"Yvette..."
The shutter sound.
Julian looked up, but it was already done. She was looking at the screen with a small satisfied nod like she had captured sothing worth keeping.
He almost said sothing. Then he looked back down at the baby. And his smile slowed. The baby’s eyes were open.
He had not expected that, or rather, he had not been paying attention, too caught up in the fact of holding her. But now he was looking. Really looking.
He went still. Her eyes were not blue.
Not the deep blue of his own eyes. Not the blue of Josh’s eyes that particular shade Julian had noticed in his son and daughters the very first ti and quietly, privately claid as his.
He looked closer. His chest tightened. He knew these eyes.
He had seen these eyes, this exact colour, this exact shape in the face of the baby girl sleeping in the cradle at the Pedro mansion right now.
The baby they had brought ho and nad Divina by Seb. The baby Amara was rocked, held, and sung to in the quiet hours of the night.
These were Divina’s eyes.
Which ant. The thought completed itself before he was ready for it, and Julian felt the ground shift beneath him in a way it had no business doing on a solid hotel corridor floor.
The baby in his arms was not Justina.
She was Yvette’s. Her actual daughter. One of the three, one of the ones who had supposedly not survived. Switched. Hidden. And the baby at ho, their Divina... was...
He thought of Amara.
He thought of driving ho empty-handed. Again. Thought of walking through that door with nothing, after everything he had told her last night, after everything she had cried herself to sleep believing was almost over.
Sothing moved in his throat that he swallowed back down imdiately.
Carefully... so carefully... he lowered the baby back into the nanny’s arms.
His face had closed. Whatever the smile had been, it was gone now, replaced by sothing controlled and unreadable that he had spent years perfecting for monts exactly like this.
Yvette was watching him.
"Julian." Her voice had lost all its edges. "What just happened?" He didn’t answer right away. He looked at the baby one more ti. At those eyes. Then he looked at Yvette.
And he didn’t know how to begin. "Shall we go?" Yvette asked.
"Yes." Julian was already moving. "To the hospital first. I need a DNA test done today." He glanced at her as they walked. "And tell , were you unconscious when the babies were born?"
Yvette kept pace beside him. "C-section. So yes, I was completely knocked out." She paused. "They didn’t let see the... they said they would handle the other two. The ones who didn’t..." She stopped. Tried again. "They offered to bring them to if I wanted. But the pain was..." She shook her head once. "I just said it was okay. Let them handle it."
Julian said nothing.
But his mind was moving very fast.
He held the door open for her this ti, not out of any particular sentint, just automatic, and walked beside her to the car. The nanny entered with the baby.
Julian was already building it as they moved. Piece by piece, the way he built everything. Yvette was knocked out during delivery. No witness. Staff with access to the ward. Two babies were declared dead before anyone who loved them had a chance to look properly.
A careful plan. A very careful plan.
Whoever had done this had thought about the tracking. Had made sure that following the trail back would take ti, require DNA, require connections and resources most people didn’t have.
They had counted on grief doing the rest of the work on mothers too devastated to ask questions, on fathers either absent or dismissed.
They had not counted on Julian Vale. He gripped the steering wheel and said nothing for the rest of the drive.
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