“He walked out. Didn’t slam the door. Didn’t yell. Just left.” I look down at our hands. “I don’t know where he is.”
“He’ll be back.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually.” Piper’s voice has lost its usual edge of irony, gone quiet and certain in a way that makes me look up at her properly for the first time since she sat down. “Livia. I’ve watched that man with your son for three days. I’ve watched him build racetracks on a rug like it’s the most important infrastructure project of his career. I’ve watched him learn which corner Nico likes to crash his cars into. That’s not a man performing for an audience. That’s not even a man doing his due diligence on a fake fiancée’s kid for optics.”
“Then what is it?”
“He doesn’t look at Nico like property,” Piper says. “He doesn’t look at him like a liability, or a complication, or a threat to his carefully managed life, even though by every metric that man uses to run his business, Nico probably qualifies as all three. He looks at him like a man starving at a window. Like something he’s been hungry for his whole life and didn’t let himself admit it until it was standing right in front of him.”
The words land somewhere under my ribs and stay there, aching.
“You didn’t see his face the first morning,” Piper continues, quieter now. “When Nico ran up to him about the racetrack, before either of you knew anything. I did. I was standing right there refilling my coffee, completely irrelevant, completely invisible, and I watched that man’s whole face change in about half a second, like something in him had been waiting his entire life for exactly that a small, loud, demanding person who wanted nothing from him except his attention. Men who are performing don’t look like that, Livia. They can fake interest. They can fake warmth, even charm, if they’re skilled enough, and Valentino Ferretti is plenty skilled. But nobody fakes that particular kind of helpless. I’ve seen him in business mode. I’ve seen him manage rooms full of powerful people without breaking a sweat. He has never once looked that unguarded doing any of it.”
“He’s not going to walk away from that,” Piper goes on. “He might need today. He might need a week. But a man who looks at a four-year-old the way Valentino Ferretti looks at your son does not disappear from that boy’s life. Whatever he’s feeling about you right now, however angry, however betrayed. He is not going to let that override what he clearly already feels for Nico.”
“That’s the part I’m afraid of.” The admission comes out before I’ve fully decided to say it, raw and unrehearsed. “Not that he’ll hate me. I mean, I am afraid of that too, obviously, but” I press my palms against my eyes. “What if he wants Nico and not me? What if this ends with him in Nico’s life completely, lawyers and custody arrangements and weekends and birthdays, and I’m just the woman who kept his son from him for four years? What if the version of this where he’s a father to Nico doesn’t include me at all?”
Piper doesn’t answer right away, which is unlike her, and the silence stretches long enough that I finally look up.
“I can’t tell you that’s not going to happen,” she says finally. “I’m not going to lie to you and pretend I know how this plays out. But I can tell you that the man who walked out of here this morning instead of staying to fight, instead of making demands, instead of immediately calling a lawyer, isn’t a man who’s already decided to cut you out. That’s a man who needed to leave before he said something he couldn’t take back. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“There is. Trust me. I’ve dated men who make demands the second they’re hurt. Valentino isn’t doing that. He’s doing the thing you do, actually, when something terrifies you too much to look at directly. He’s leaving the room.”
I let that sit for a moment, the parallel uncomfortable and probably accurate.
“I’m going to give him space,” I say eventually, more to myself than to her, testing the shape of the decision out loud. “One day. I’m not going to chase him down or text him or show up wherever he’s gone. I owe him that much, after four years ofnot giving him a choice in any of this. He gets a day to be furious without me in the room.”
“And then?”
“And then I face whatever comes. Lawyers, custody, all of it. I’ll face it.” My voice steadies as I say it, some old, stubborn resolve surfacing underneath the wreckage. “I’ve spent four years being the only adult in Nico’s life who had to be strong about everything. I know how to do hard things. I just thought I’d get to do this one with more warning.”
Piper squeezes my hand once and lets go, reaching instead for her phone, which has been buzzing insistently in her bag for the last several minutes in a way she’s been very deliberately ignoring.
She glances at the screen. Her jaw tightens.
“Who is it?”
“No one.”
“Piper.”
“It’s logistics.” She types something, frowning, then deletes it. Types again. Deletes that too.
I watch this happen three more times before I find enough of myself to be amused by it, a small, fragile thing surfacing through the wreckage of the morning.
“Since when do you draft texts?”
“I’m not drafting.” She doesn’t look up from the screen. “I’m editing. For maximum hostility.”
“That’s the same thing, Piper.”
“It is not the same thing. Drafting implies care. This is tactical.” She finally sets the phone face-down on the floorbeside her, like it’s personally offended her, and exhales hard through her nose. “Dominic Calder wants to discuss gala logistics for the consortium closing event. In person. This afternoon.”
“And that requires four drafts and visible blood pressure because—”
