Chapter 79

Chapter 79

Alejandro’s POV

The office had floor to ceiling windows.

I’d always liked that about it, the way the city spread out below like something that belonged to me, which on most days it practically did. I’d done some of my best thinking at this window, made decisions worth eight figures standing exactly here with a coffee going cold in my hand.

Today I’d been standing here for forty minutes and hadn’t thought a single useful thing.

“The Reeves call is in ten minutes,” Danny said from the doorway.

“Cancel it.”

“It’s the third time this week.”

“Then they know the drill.”

“Dro.” He stepped inside, closing the door behind him with the careful energy of someone who had made a calculated decision to push. “You haven’t taken a meeting in four days. You’ve cancelled three calls, left two board sessions early, and according to Maria you haven’t eaten anything at the house that wasn’t poured from a bottle.”

“Maria needs to mind her business.”

“Maria’s worried about you,” he replied evenly. “So am I.”

I turned from the window.

Danny looked back at me without flinching, which took something because I’d been told my face in this particular mood was not a comfortable thing to be on the receiving end of.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You look terrible.”

“Thank you, Danny.”

“Not the good kind.” He crossed his arms. “When did you last sleep?”

I thought about it honestly. “Tuesday.”

“It’s Friday.”

“I’m aware of what day it is.”

He exhaled, dragging a hand over his face. “This is about Mira.”

“This is about work,” I replied flatly.

“You haven’t done any work in four days, so no, it’s not about work.” He sat down uninvited in the chair across from my desk, which he only did when he’d decided the conversation was happening regardless of my position on it. “Marlo says she went to Millhaven.”

I looked at him.

“Her mother,” he continued carefully. “He said you found her.”

“Marlo talks too much.”

“Marlo’s worried too.” He leaned forward. “You found her mother, Dro. You did that. And you’re standing at this window looking like a man who lost something instead of someone who just gave the woman he loves the biggest thing she’s ever received.” He tilted his head. “Why aren’t you with her?”

The question sat in the room.

I turned back to the window.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“Uncomplicate it.”

“I can’t,” I replied, and something in my voice must have carried the full weight of that because Danny went quiet in a way he rarely did.

The truth was I’d been standing at this window thinking about a file I’d read three times in the last four days. Not Reeves’ file, something older, something I’d pulled from my father’s private records two nights ago while he was at a dinner I’d declined to attend.

Birth records.

Dates that lined up in a way I’d spent two days trying to make not line up, checking and rechecking the arithmetic like the answer might change if I approached it from a different angle.

It didn’t change.

It sat there immovable and impossible and completely, devastatingly true.

I hadn’t told anyone.

I hadn’t slept properly since.

“There’s something I’m dealing with,” I said carefully. “Something I need to work through before I can—” I stopped. “It’s not simple, Danny. I need you to trust me on that.”

He studied me for a long moment.

“Does it change how you feel about her,” he asked quietly.

I looked at the city below.

At all those lights that never fully went out.
Thought about Mira’s cold hands and her genuine laugh and the way she’d looked at me in Zara’s living room like she was trying to find the lie and couldn’t.

“No,” I said quietly. “It doesn’t change anything.”
Danny was silent for a moment.

“Then whatever it is,” he said simply, “figure it out fast. Because from what Marlo says she’s running out of—”

“I know,” I cut him off.

He stood up. Straightened his jacket.

“Ten minutes,” he said. “Reeves call. I’m not cancelling it.”

He left before I could argue.

I stayed at the window.

Pulled out my phone.

Opened her contact.

Stared at it.

Then I opened a different screen entirely, the document I’d been building for three days, cross referencing dates and records and a name that kept appearing in places it had no business appearing.

James Montenegro.

My father.

And a woman named Flora Martinez who’d been twenty three years old in the same city as him for eight months before she disappeared from his life entirely and turned up pregnant six months later in a different city entirely.

The arithmetic was simple.

The implications were not.

I locked my phone and pressed it against my mouth and stood there in the quiet of my office while the city went about its Friday below me completely indifferent to the fact that everything I thought I knew about my own life had just rearranged itself into something I hadn’t been given a manual for.

My desk phone buzzed.

“Mr. Reeves on line one,” my assistant’s voice said.

I looked at the window for one more second.

Then I walked to my desk and picked up the phone.
“Tell me everything you have on James Montenegro,” I said the moment the line connected. “Specifically 2001 and 2002. Every movement, every name, every hotel receipt if you can get it.”

Reeves was quiet for a beat.

“That’s a different kind of request,” he said carefully.

“I know what kind of request it is,” I replied. “Can you do it?”

“I can do it.”

“Then do it,” I said. “And Reeves.”

“Sir.”

“Nobody knows about this conversation.” I kept my voice completely flat. “Not Marlo. Not Danny. Nobody.”

“Understood,” he replied.

I put the phone down.

Sat in my chair in the quiet office.

And for the first time since Tuesday, I felt something that wasn’t just the heavy paralysis of a truth I didn’t know what to do with.

I felt like a man with a plan.

Which was dangerous.

But it was better than standing at a window until Friday became Monday and nothing moved.

My personal phone buzzed on the desk.

It was Marlo.

She’s at Zara’s. Ace has been there every day.

I looked at the message for a long moment.

Something tightened in my chest that had nothing to do with the documents on my desk.

I typed back two words.

I know.

Then I put the phone face down and opened my laptop and got to work.

Because whatever was coming, whatever the full truth turned out to be when Reeves finished pulling it apart, one thing had already been decided.

In the silence of a sleepless Tuesday night with a birth record on his desk and the city indifferent below him, Alejandro Montenegro had made a choice.

And he wasn’t unmakng it.

Not for anyone.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​