13. Talia
Talia
By the time I reach Crossridge, the lobby already feels wrong.
Nothing obvious has changed. The security desk is staffed, the elevators move with their usual quiet efficiency, and the morning crowd moves through the marble lobby with coffee cups and laptop bags, all of them carrying the practiced urgency of people already behind schedule.
A man near the seating area lowers his phone when he sees me. Two assistants by the elevators stop talking too quickly. At the front desk, one of the security guards glances at me, then away, his expression carefully neutral in a way that makes my stomach tighten.
I slow my steps without meaning to.
For one foolish second, I wonder if this is simply what guilt feels like when I keep holding Declan at a distance, even after watching how easily he fits into spaces I’ve spent years protecting. Then Sloane appears near the elevators, phone in hand, her expression calm enough to terrify me.
“Talia,” she says. “Come upstairs with me.”
I don’t ask why. I already know.
Not the details, maybe, but enough. I know from the way she angles her body slightly between me and the lobby.
I know from the way the security guard’s attention changes as we approach the elevators.
I know from the cold, sinking certainty that only arrives when a life you have carefully held together begins shifting beneath your feet.
The elevator doors close behind us, and Sloane presses the button for the executive floor.
“Is it Flynn?” I ask.
“He’s safe,” she says immediately.
The speed of her answer keeps me upright and I grip the strap of my bag tighter. “Then what happened?”
She hesitates for less than a second before turning her phone toward me. The headline is ugly in the precise way gossip sites specialize in being ugly.
Crossridge Billionaire’s Secret Son? Foundation Visit Sparks Questions
For a moment, I don’t read anything else. I can’t. My eyes lock on the photograph beneath the headline, and the rest of the elevator seems to fall away.
Declan is sitting on a chair of the Foundation activity room with Flynn beside him.
His sleeves are rolled up, his tie loosened, and there is glue on his watch.
Flynn is holding the half-finished model airplane between them, smiling with the kind of open delight he gives only when he forgets to be shy. Declan is smiling back.
He isn’t smiling for the camera or for anyone watching. He’s smiling for Flynn, and that’s the part that hurts.
The photo should be sweet. Private. Ordinary. It should belong to yesterday afternoon and the small, impossible warmth that moved through me when I found them absorbed in a crooked propeller and a bottle of glue.
Instead, it’s online, captioned, and shared before either of us even knew someone had been watching. An ordinary afternoon has already been turned into something else, something the world feels entitled to dissect. My fingers go cold around the strap of my bag.
“Who took this?”
“We’re working on that,” Sloane says.
The doors open before I can ask anything else.
Marcus’s office is already occupied when we arrive.
Graham stands near the windows with one hand in his pocket and the other wrapped around a coffee he has clearly forgotten to drink.
Marcus is at his desk, not sitting, his attention fixed on Sloane’s laptop.
Tessa stands beside him with her arms folded, her face pale in a way that makes me remember this is not just Crossridge gossip.
This is the Foundation. Her Foundation. The thing she and Graham built to give families help before they reached the point of breaking.
Adrian stands slightly apart from the others, quiet and watchful, his attention moving between the screen and the room like he’s already calculating outcomes no one else has said out loud yet.
Declan is there too.
He turns the moment I enter, and whatever he sees on my face makes him go still, and for one terrible second, I almost ask him. Did you know?
The question rises before I can stop it, fueled by fear and old instincts and the memory of spending six years as the only wall between Flynn and everything that could hurt him.
Declan has every reason to want the world to know Flynn exists.
Every reason to want proof he belongs in our son’s life.
Every reason to hate the secrecy I forced onto him.
But then I look at him.
His face is not defensive. It’s not guilty.
It’s furious in a quiet, controlled way that reminds me why people underestimate him exactly once.
His gaze moves from me to the photograph on the screen and back again, and I understand, with a shame so swift it makes me feel unsteady, that he’s finding out the damage in the same way I am.
I set my bag down because I don’t trust my hands.
“Please tell me Flynn’s school hasn’t seen this.”
“Not yet,” Sloane says. “At least not officially. I’ve already contacted the Foundation staff and the school liaison. We’re keeping the language focused on unauthorized photography during a field trip and child privacy violations. No one is confirming anything else.”
“Good,” I say, though the word scrapes on the way out.
Tessa moves closer, her voice gentle. “Talia, I’m so sorry. There were volunteers, teachers, Foundation staff, contractors moving in and out. We had consent protocols for the children, but this wasn’t taken by the official photographer. Whoever did this knew exactly what angle they wanted.”
That should make me feel better. It doesn’t, because intention is worse than accident.
Sloane turns the laptop so I can see what she has open.
There are tabs across the top of the browser, screenshots, timestamps, account details, and a message thread with someone from legal.
She doesn’t rush through the explanation, which I appreciate more than I can say.
Panic makes everything too loud. Sloane’s calm gives the room edges again.
“The photo first appeared on a shell social account created three weeks ago,” she says. “No real profile, no normal history, no personal network. It posted the image with a vague caption, then the gossip site picked it up within fourteen minutes.”
“Fourteen minutes?” Graham asks.
“Which means the site was either watching the account or expecting the upload.”
Marcus’s jaw tightens. “Placement.”
“That’s my read.” Sloane clicks into another screen. “The post was amplified through a media placement firm. Nothing directly traceable to Apex, but the same firm was used during the last Crossridge rumor push.”
The room goes quiet. Julian’s name does not need to be spoken for me to feel him in the center of it.
Tessa’s expression hardens. “He used children.”
“He used proximity,” Marcus says, his voice low. “Children were simply available.”
That distinction turns my stomach. Declan doesn't say a word, and I realize I'd almost rather hear him swear than watch him stand there carrying his anger in silence.
Sloane looks from Marcus to Graham before continuing. “We can’t prove Apex ordered it. Not yet. But the pattern is too familiar to ignore.”
Marcus finally looks up. “He’s testing us.”
No one disagrees.
Declan’s voice cuts through the silence before the next strategy can begin.
“He’s not testing us,” he says. “He’s testing how far we’re willing to let him use a child to do it.”
The room stills.
Marcus’s gaze sharpens. Graham straightens slightly. Tessa’s hand lowers from where it had been pressed against her arm.
Sloane doesn’t interrupt. She watches Declan instead. He doesn’t look at any of them when he says it.
“He’s my son.”
The words land clean. No hesitation. No qualification, and for a second, no one speaks.
Tessa’s breath catches, soft but audible in the quiet. Graham goes still near the windows, his expression shifting from calculation to something more personal. Marcus doesn’t look away from Declan, as if measuring the weight of what was just said instead of the implications.
Adrian’s gaze lowers briefly, thoughtful rather than surprised, like he’s already moving through consequences while acknowledging the truth of it.
No one questions him. No one asks for clarification. They believe him.
Then Graham exhales slowly, like something has just shifted into place. “All right,” he says. “Then we stop treating this like a rumor.”
Marcus nods once. “We contain exposure, lock down the source, and shut down any narrative that puts him at risk.”
Adrian, who has been silent until now, sets his coffee down with deliberate care. “Then legal treats this as a direct threat, not a reputational inconvenience.”
Tessa’s voice is quieter, but no less firm. “And the Foundation responds accordingly. That photo never should have been taken. We make that clear.”
Sloane closes one of the open tabs. “Then we adjust messaging immediately. This isn’t speculation anymore. It’s protection.”
Only then does Declan look at me.
The meeting shifts after that into the kind of controlled response Crossridge handles better than most companies handle ordinary days.
Sloane outlines the public position. Tessa prepares to speak with the Foundation director.
Graham calls legal. Marcus starts working through security exposure with the kind of calm that makes danger feel organized.
I stand there listening, answering when someone asks me a direct question, but part of me remains fixed on the photo.
Declan and Flynn.
My son laughing with his father while neither of them knew the world was watching.
I have spent years imagining all the ways Flynn could be hurt by knowing the truth too soon.
I imagined confusion, instability, disappointment.
I imagined Declan pushing too hard or disappearing too easily.
I imagined myself having to explain the unexplainable to a little boy who still asks whether airplanes need weekends.
I didn’t imagine a stranger turning one of Flynn’s happiest afternoons into evidence.