Chapter 3

The room was very quiet.

I lay back against the headboard and let the memories come.

I thought about Sebastian.

The man who had promised to love me for the rest of his life. Who had started sleeping with Melissa while I was pregnant with our second child. I had miscarried from the shock. Melissa had moved in and told me to leave. Sebastian had told me that if I wanted to keep custody of Ethan, I'd have to walk away with nothing.

I walked.

A year later, Ethan got seriously ill. I was short five thousand pounds for his hospital fees and I went to Sebastian to ask for child support. He was sitting with his arm around Melissa.

That's your problem, he'd said. Go away. Melissa will give me another.

I had walked away from that too.

I had used every wound they gave me as fuel. I built Whitmore Enterprises out of pure necessity — because the alternative was failing my son, and I wasn't willing to do that.

I had thought Ethan understood. I had thought he carried it with him the way I did — the memory of how cold it was, how hungry, how humiliating, and how we'd survived it together.

But he hadn't. Or he had, and he'd decided it didn't outweigh what he felt for Vivienne.

The tears came before I could stop them.

I wiped them away and told myself it was the last time.

In this life, I would not spend the next twenty years bleeding myself dry for someone who would let me die on a hospital gurney without picking up the phone.

The next morning, the office door flew open.

Ethan stood in the doorway. His suit was wrinkled. His eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he hadn't slept. In his hands were a stack of documents — the recission notices, the account freeze paperwork — gripped so tight his knuckles were bone-white.

"Mum." He stepped inside and dropped them on my desk with a flat smack. "Have you lost your mind?"

I looked up at him calmly.

"I told you yesterday. If you left to go after her, we were done."

"Done." He laughed, a sharp, disbelieving sound. "You've frozen every account I have. You've pulled my title. You're taking my flat and my car. I'm your son—"

"I'm aware."

"Twenty years." His voice cracked. "Twenty years, just the two of us. You always said — you always made me feel like I was everything to you. Was that real? Any of it?"

He was crying now. The tears made him look very young.

"How can you do this?" he whispered. "Because I fell in love with someone you disapprove of? You'd rather destroy me than accept that I want to be happy?"

I stood up.

"You want to talk about what was done to us?" I said. "I'll tell you. When you were five, Melissa stood in our doorway and told me I had no dignity, that I should leave quietly if I had any self-respect. Your father stood next to her and looked at me like I was in the way. I walked out of that house with three hundred pounds and a crying child, and no one helped us. Not one person."

I kept my voice steady.

"Your father forced me to leave everything behind. And when you got sick — when I went to him for money because I couldn't cover your hospital bills — he said you could die for all he cared, and turned back to Melissa."

"She destroyed my marriage. He destroyed our security. And now you want me to welcome their daughter into this family, smile at your wedding, and call it forgiveness."

Ethan's mouth was trembling. "Mum, it's been twenty years. People change. Dad knows he made mistakes — even he admits that—"

"Twenty years doesn't heal what they did," I said. "Time doesn't work that way. Did you think it would?"

His voice fell very quiet. "I love her. You were always going to be first for me. But why do you have to make me choose? Why can't you just let me have both?"

I looked at him for a long moment.

"You had a choice before you walked out that door last night," I said. "Goodbye, Ethan."

He stood there with his fists at his sides and his face going through things I didn't have the heart to name.

Then he squared his shoulders.

"I know you need time," he said. "I know. Remember your blood pressure — take your medication. Call me if you feel unwell."

He walked out.

I sat back down and stared at the surface of my desk until I could breathe normally again.

Then I called my lawyer.

"Mr. Ellsworth. It's Diana. I want to put a will in place."

"Of course, Ms. Whitmore. What terms?"

"Everything — all shares in Whitmore Enterprises, all properties, all holdings — to be donated in full to the Women and Children's Protection Foundation upon my death. Ethan is to receive nothing."

Silence.

"Nothing at all?"

"Not a single pound."