5. Declan
Declan
“Talia, wait.”
She doesn’t. Instead, she walks through the Crossridge lobby with one hand on the boy’s shoulder, her laptop bag bumping lightly against her hip, and every inch of her posture arranged into calm.
It’s impressive, really. Terrifying, but impressive.
The woman has just detonated six years of my life in the middle of a café, and somehow she still looks as if she’s on her way to correct a contract clause.
He walks beside her, clutching his toy planes and looking back over his shoulder at me with open curiosity.
My son.
Two words, and the world tilts into something I don’t recognize.
My son.
Two words, and the world becomes something I don’t recognize.
“Talia,” I say again, quieter this time.
She stops near the bank of elevators, but only because he has slowed to look at the bronze model of the Crossridge building displayed beside the security desk. She glances down at him, then at me, and whatever she sees on my face makes her expression tighten.
Not with fear, but with resolve, which might be worse.
“Flynn,” she says gently, “can you sit on that bench for a minute and finish coloring the plane wing?”
He looks between us again. “Are you mad?”
The question is simple, the kind only a six-year-old would ask. And somehow, that simplicity cuts far deeper than anything an adult might have said.
Talia’s hand tightens once around the strap of her bag. “No, sweetheart.”
Flynn doesn’t look convinced. He studies me, and I’m completely unprepared for the force of those eyes focusing on me without warning.
They are mine. They’re absolutely, impossibly mine.
But the expression in them is all his own.
Curious. Cautious. Still innocent enough to believe adults tell the truth.
I don’t know what to do with that. Or any of this.
“I’m not mad at you,” I say, because it’s the only sentence in my head that makes sense.
Flynn nods slowly, as if that was the important part. Maybe it was. Then he carries his coloring book to the bench a few feet away, drops into place with a seriousness that makes my chest ache, and returns to his airplane as if the world hasn’t shifted on its axis.
Talia waits until he’s settled before she turns back to me.
“Not here,” she says.
Her voice is low, controlled, and professional.
I almost laugh, except there’s nothing funny about the fact that she knows exactly what I need to ask and still thinks she can choose the terms of it.
“No,” I say. “Here.”
Her eyes flash. “Declan.”
“No.” My voice comes out quieter than I expect, and somehow that makes it sharper. “You don’t get to say my name like I’m being unreasonable.”
Something moves across her face, quick and painful, but she smooths it away before I can catch it fully.
“I have Flynn with me.”
“I can see that.”
The words come out wrong, rougher than I intend and too close to an accusation I don’t mean. She hears it. Her chin lifts a fraction, and suddenly the woman from the conference room is back. Guarded. Brilliant. Prepared to defend every inch of ground beneath her feet.
Good.
Maybe if she fights me, I’ll know what to do with the hurt.
“I am not having this conversation in front of him,” she says.
“Then where?”
“The small conference room off the café.”
I look toward Flynn. He’s bent over the coloring book, one sock slipping, his toy plane resting beside his elbow. There is blue marker on his thumb and concentration tucked between his brows.
My son.
God.
It’s too much and not enough.
Talia follows my gaze, and for the first time since the café, the control in her expression slips in a way she can’t hide. Whatever else is true, whatever choices she made, she loves him. That much isn’t a question. It’s in the way her whole body seems aware of him, even when she's looking at me.
“I’ll keep the door open,” she says. “He’ll be where I can see him.”
I should argue, and I want to argue. Instead, I nod once.
We walk to the small conference room in silence. The room sits just off the café, one of the smaller meeting spaces Crossridge uses for informal conversations and quick strategy sessions.
Talia steps inside first and immediately glances back toward Flynn on the bench outside. I leave the door open and close the distance between us anyway. For a moment, neither of us speaks.
The room smells faintly of coffee and dry-erase markers. Someone left a half-written agenda on the whiteboard from an earlier meeting. Client onboarding. Risk notes. Timeline updates. Ordinary business words for a morning that has become anything but.
Talia sets her laptop bag on the table with careful precision, and I stare at her hands because I don’t trust myself to stare at her face.
“When?” I ask.
She inhales slowly.
“Declan—”
“When?”
Her shoulders pull back. “Six years ago.”
A laugh leaves me, low and humorless. “That narrows it down beautifully.”
Her mouth tightens. “After Singapore.”
After Singapore.
As if Singapore had been a weather system that passed through. A delayed flight. An unfortunate inconvenience instead of a hotel balcony and her mouth on mine and the kind of reckless night that had lived under my skin for seven years no matter how many cities I put between myself and the memory.
“How long after?”
She looks away. That’s the answer before she gives it.
“I found out about six weeks later.”
Six weeks. Six weeks after she left before sunrise. Six weeks after I woke to an empty room, one untouched coffee cup, and the faint impression of her in sheets that still smelled like her skin. Six weeks after I told myself it had been one night and one night did not get to hurt like abandonment.
I grip the edge of the conference table.
“You found out,” I say slowly, “and you didn’t tell me.”
Her eyes return to mine. “No.”
One word with no apology wrapped around it. No softening. Just the truth between us with its hands full of knives. I nod once, because if I don’t move something, I might do something worse. Like ask why in a voice that sounds less controlled than I need it to.
But the question comes anyway.
“Why?”
Talia’s expression changes. Not enough for most people to notice, but I’m learning the language of her again against my will. The tiny flinch beneath the steadiness. The breath she takes before choosing which truth will cost the least.
“Because I didn’t know what telling you would do to him.”
“To him,” I repeat.
“Yes.”
“He didn’t exist yet.”
“He did to me.”
That stops me. Not because it’s unfair, but because it’s not.
Her hand goes to her abdomen for half a second, so quickly that I almost miss it. A memory, not a gesture. An old instinct that shouldn’t matter and somehow tears something open in me anyway.
I think of Talia alone seven years ago, younger than she is now, finding out she was pregnant after a night neither of us knew how to name. I think of her standing in a pharmacy aisle or a bathroom or a doctor’s office, learning that the reckless warmth between us had become a heartbeat.
I should have been there. The thought hits hard enough to make me angry all over again, mostly because there’s nowhere to put it.
“You decided for me,” I say.
“I decided for him.”
“You decided I wasn’t allowed to know I have a son.”
Her eyes flash. “I decided my child deserved stability.”
“Our child.”
The words fill the room, and Talia goes still. Outside, Flynn hums quietly to himself while he colors, the sound slipping through the open door. Small and bright and unbearably normal.
Talia swallows. “Yes.”
It should satisfy me, but it doesn’t. Because yes is too small a word for this.
Yes does not give back birthdays I missed, or first steps, or fevers, or school pictures, or a thousand mornings where he asked about airplanes.
Instead, I was somewhere else, signing contracts, closing deals, making people laugh while a child with my eyes grew up without knowing my name.
“Did he ask?” I say.
Her brows knit. “What?”
“About me.”
Pain crosses her face before she can hide it. That is answer enough, but apparently, I’ve become a man who needs to hear pain out loud.
“Did he ask about his father?”
She looks toward the doorway. Flynn is still coloring, but his little shoulders have gone quieter. Talia notices too.
Her voice drops. “Not in the way you mean.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s six, Declan. It means he asks why other kids have dads at school pickup. It means he asks whether families come in different shapes. It means I answer carefully because I refuse to make him feel like something is missing from him.”
Something in my chest fractures, and I look away because I cannot hold her eyes and that truth at the same time; for a moment, the lobby and Crossridge disappear, and I'm somewhere else entirely.
Singapore.
Rain against the hotel windows. Her laugh low and disbelieving in the dark.
The city below us blurred into gold and black, and Talia sitting on the edge of the bed in my shirt like she had stolen something and intended to keep it.
I remember my hands at her waist, her skin warm beneath my palms, the way she turned toward me when I said her name.
Not quickly. Not carelessly. As if she had already learned the inflections of my voice and was deciding whether to trust it.
God, we had been reckless, but not careless.
That’s the part I’ve never been able to explain to myself.
It hadn’t felt like a mistake while it was happening.
Her mouth had been soft and sure against mine.
Her fingers had moved through my hair as if she’d been holding herself back for longer than one evening.
When she laughed against my shoulder, I had felt something in me go quiet in a way I didn’t understand enough to fear.
Skin against skin, and her breath at my throat. My name in her mouth, stripped of all the polish I usually wore for the world. And afterward, tangled in hotel sheets while morning threatened the windows, she had traced an absent line over my chest and told me she didn’t usually do things like this.