Chapter 169 What He Didn't Know
Chapter 169 What He Didn't Know
Dominic's POV
The comments were still loading when I turned onto the estate road.
I'd made the mistake of opening the post at a red light three miles back — Ryker Sterling's post, the one that had already cleared a thousand responses by the time I'd seen it in the parking garage.
I closed the app immediately. Then opened it again at the next light, the way you press a bruise to confirm it still hurts. The comments scrolled past in a continuous stream: congratulations, they're perfect together, she deserves this, finally, about time.
Strangers celebrating a wedding between my ex-wife and another man with the unselfconscious enthusiasm of people who had no idea I existed.
I set the phone face-down on the passenger seat and kept driving.
My hands on the wheel were white at the knuckles. The pressure wasn't anger — or it had passed through anger somewhere on the highway and come out the other side as something that didn't have as clean a name.
Regret was too small a word for it. It was more like the specific, airless feeling of a man standing at the bottom of a sequence of choices he made himself, looking up at how far they extend.
She was getting married in twenty-four days.
The estate gates appeared in my headlights. I drove through them without slowing down.
---
Sebastian was awake. That was the first thing I registered when I pushed through the front door — the particular brightness of the sitting room light and the small, absorbed sounds of a child at work on something that required concentration.
Martha was cross-legged on the floor with Sebastian between her knees, both of them bent over a spread of Lego pieces. She looked up when the door opened.
Sebastian looked up half a second later — and then he was on his feet and crossing the room at a run, arms already reaching before he'd fully closed the distance.
He hit me somewhere around the midsection. I caught him and lifted him in the same motion, his weight settling against my chest with that particular solidity that children have — dense, warm, entirely trusting.
"Daddy." He pulled back just far enough to look at my face. "Can I go to Mommy's house this weekend?"
I went very still, though I kept my face from showing it. Martha rose quietly from the floor and began gathering the scattered Lego pieces with the practiced discretion of someone who understood when a room needed to belong to fewer people. I set Sebastian down and crouched to his level.
"Mommy has a new boyfriend now," I said. "She's going to be pretty busy for a while."
First came disappointment — the open, uncomplicated kind that five-year-olds haven't yet learned to disguise, his mouth pulling down at the corners, his eyes losing their brightness. Then it shifted. Not into resignation, but into something that looked almost like understanding — a quiet internal adjustment, some calculation running behind his eyes that I couldn't follow. He settled into a stillness that didn't belong to a boy who was simply swallowing his feelings.
He nodded once. "Okay," he said.
I looked at my son and felt confused. What is that? Why is he so calm about this?
---
Martha had dinner on the table by seven-thirty.
On the way to the dining room I stopped at the first-floor guest room and knocked — the automatic courtesy of a man who grew up in a house with certain rules about closed doors.
No answer.
I knocked again, harder. Still nothing, not the muffled acknowledgment of someone who'd heard and was occupied, just the flat specific quiet of a room that was empty. Martha appeared from the direction of the kitchen and paused when she saw me at the door.
"Mrs. Whitmore left this afternoon," she said. "A car came for her. She didn't say where she was going, or when she'd be back."
"What time?"
"Around three. Maybe a little after."
Something uneasy moved at the edge of my thoughts — the feeling of a number that doesn't add up but that you haven't yet sat down to check. I pressed it down. My mother came and went on her own schedule; she always had. "Set the table for two," I said. "Sebastian and I will eat in the dining room."
---
We ate mostly in silence, the way fathers and sons sometimes do when both of them have things on their minds that don't fit into dinner conversation. Sebastian worked through his pasta with the focused efficiency of a child who takes meals seriously.
I watched him and thought about twenty-four days. About a ring on her hand and a voice that hadn't trembled once.
Then I set down my fork and asked it.
"Do you like Dad more," I said, "or Mommy more?"
Sebastian looked up from his plate. He was quiet for a moment — long enough that I noticed it, long enough that I understood he was taking the question seriously. When he answered, his voice had a careful, measured quality that no five-year-old should have had to develop yet.
"Both," he said, watching me. "I like both the same."
There was something in his eyes that I recognized without wanting to — a child's particular fear of the wrong answer, the specific terror of a boy who had understood, from experience, that admitting a preference might cost him the one he didn't choose.
He wasn't answering the question. He was trying to survive it.
I looked at that, and something settled in my chest with the clean, certain weight of a decision already made.
This is for him.
Whatever I do next, it's for Sebastian. He needs stability. He needs his mother back in this house, back in his life the way she used to be. A child shouldn't have to be afraid of that question. Twenty-four days was not nothing.
Twenty-four days was still time, and I was not a man who had ever accepted a deadline he couldn't move. I would find a way. I had to find a way.
It wasn't self-deception. It was clarity. I believed it completely. I needed to believe it, so I did.
My phone buzzed against the table.