Chapter 5 A miracle
ALEXANDER POV
I had been in the middle of destroying someone.
Professionally speaking.
Henderson from the quarterly audit team had been talking for eleven minutes about numbers that didn't add up and I had been watching him sweat through his collar with the particular satisfaction of a man who already knew exactly where this was going. My lawyers were to my left. My CFO was to my right. Twelve other people sat around the table trying very hard to look like they were somewhere else.
I let Henderson finish his sentence.
Then I opened my mouth to end his career.
My phone rang. My phone fucking rang.
I don't take calls in meetings. Everyone in this building knew that. My assistant knew that. The people in this room knew that. The entire city of New York had somehow absorbed that information through osmosis.
I glanced at the screen to see who had the audacity.
Unknown number.
I was going to ignore it. I had already decided to ignore it and was turning back to Henderson when something made me look at the screen again.
I picked it up.
I don't know why. I still don't know why.
"Yes." I snapped.
Silence on the other end. Then a small
sound. A breath. And then-
"Dad."
The word hit me somewhere I had not felt anything in a very long time.
Three years. Eight months. Fourteen days.
That was how long it had been since I last heard my son's voice. Since the funeral where he had stood beside me in a suit too small for him and said nothing. Since the doctors told me grief did this sometimes, that it would pass, that children were resilient.
I stopped believing them.
I was on my feet before I knew I was standing. My chair rolled back and hit the wall behind me. Twelve people flinched. I was already walking toward the door.
"Liam." I could barely keep my cool. "Say that
again."
"Dad," he said again, he was more certain this time. Like the word was coming back to him from somewhere he had locked it away.
I pressed my hand flat against the door.
That’s my son's voice.
After everything. After every specialist and every therapist and every morning of watching him sign things I couldn't understand across a breakfast table. After four years of silence that sat in my house like a fifth wall.
My son was on the phone.
"Where are vou?" I said.
"I found you a new mum."
I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at it.
Then put it back.
"You found me a what?"
"A new mum." He sounded completely unbothered. Like this was a perfectly reasonable thing to call his father out of a boardroom to report. "She saved me, Dad. The men were chasing me and she hid me. She was crying and I asked her why and she told me everything." A small pause. "She's really sad. The saddest person l've ever seen. I think you should marry her."
Fuck! I almost lost him again.
I pressed two fingers against my forehead.
My son had not spoken in years. He had not said a single word to me, to his therapists, to anyone. And the thing that had finally unlocked his voice was a crying woman he had known for less than an hour.
"Liam. Where are you right now?"
He gave me the address.
"Don't move," I said. "I'm coming."
"Dad?"
"Yes."
A beat of quiet.
"Please be nice to her,I know you’re not always nice" he said softly.
"But she’s had a really bad day."
I had absolutely no response to that.
"Don't move," I said again, and hung up.
I turned around. The entire boardroom was watching me with the collective expression of people who had witnessed something they didn't understand and weren't sure they were allowed to ask about.
I looked at Henderson.
"You're fired," I said. "Everyone else — we're done."
I walked out.
My assistant was talking the entire drive.
Something about the address, the street, cross referencing it with something. I heard none of it. My mind was doing something it very rarely did.
It was running.
Three years of silence and my son had spoken for the first time because of a woman he had known for less than an hour. A crying stranger who had hidden him from men who had no business being anywhere near a six year old. Who had sat with him and listened and given him her phone without question.
What kind of person did that?
What kind of person was sad enough that
my son, my quiet, observant, impossibly perceptive son, had looked at her and decided she needed rescuing right back.
And why today? Why this woman? Why had she managed in forty minutes what four years of specialists and resources and a father who would burn the entire world down for his son could not.
I didn't know whether to be grateful or furious.
Probably both.
But I knew deep down whoever it was, I wasn't letting go.
The car stopped.
I was out before the engine cut. I scanned the street immediately, left, right, a low wall near the corner and then I saw Liam and everything went quiet for one second.
He was safe. Unharmed.
Then I looked at the woman sitting beside him.
And the world stopped making sense.
It was Anastasia.
Not similar. Not she reminded me of. Not
grief playing tricks on a tired mind.
It was her.
My dead wife.