Dominic’s POV
"Simon. Brother." I tip my chair back on two legs, phone wedged between ear and shoulder. "Party tonight. Hartwell House — my grandmother's estate. Nine o'clock."
"Dom, it's a Tuesday."
"Bring your wife. Bring that weird investor who always smells like cigars. Open bar, good music, beautiful people."
"I heard there's some situation with the house. A woman?"
"That's exactly why I need a party. The louder the better."
I hang up and scroll to the next name. By the time I'm done, I've invited half my contacts list — business partners, old college friends, club promoters, anyone who knows how to fill a room with expensive noise.
The plan is simple. Make this house unlivable. Make Mira see that coexisting with me is a battle she can't win. Make her take the money and vanish so I can deal with this house on my own terms.
I checked her schedule on the kitchen board. Late faculty meeting tonight, some curriculum review. She took the kid.
The house fills fast. By ten, bodies pack every room — designer shoes on Vivian's hardwood, cocktails sweating onto surfaces that survived two world wars. A woman in a backless dress runs her fingertips along the mahogany credenza in the hallway, the one Grandmother polished every Sunday morning for forty years.
"Oh my God, this is gorgeous. Is it an antique? Can I touch it?"
"Touch it, sit on it, take it home." I raise my glass to her. "Anything for the guests."
She laughs like I'm hilarious. I'm not being funny.
The party swells and I move through it with champagne and my best CEO grin bolted in place. This is what I'm built for — the room, the performance. But tonight the mask weighs more than usual.
"This place is incredible," murmurs someone whose name left my brain the moment it arrived. She presses close, palm against my chest, perfume strong enough to strip paint. "You must have so many memories here."
"A few." My eyes drift to the doorway where my grandmother used to stand, watching me with that expression that said I see exactly who you are and I love you anyway.
I swallow champagne until the thought goes down with it.
Two hours in and the conversations have blurred into one long hum. The women flirting with me all share the same smile — pretty, practiced, reaching for something I'm not sure I have. I drift through rooms feeling like a stranger at my own party.
The hallway toward the back of the house swallows the noise. Thick walls, closed doors, the particular silence that lives in old houses after dark. My feet carry me somewhere I haven't been in twenty years — a small sitting room where Grandmother kept her chess set on a table by the window.
I push the door open expecting dust and emptiness.
A boy sits alone at the chess board, arranging pieces with the focused intensity of a surgeon.
My stomach drops. The kid. Mira's kid. He's supposed to be with her.
He looks up. No fear. Just the flat assessment of a child deciding whether this interruption is worth acknowledging.
"Do you know how to play?" He points at the board.
"What?"
"Chess. Do you play?"
"I..." The words escape before I can catch them. "My grandmother taught me. In this room."
Something shifts behind his face. "Grandma Viv was teaching me too. But she got too tired."
Grandma Viv. This boy sat in this room with my grandmother, learned chess from her hands the same way I did, called her by a name that hits me somewhere below the ribs where I keep things I don't look at.
He gestures to the chair across from him. "You can play if you want. I'm still learning."
I should leave. Go back to my champagne and my strategy and the crowd I invited to make his mother's life hell. Instead I lower myself into the worn leather chair that still holds a ghost of my grandfather's cigars.
"Your queen's on the wrong square," I say, reaching for the board. "White queen on white. Black queen on black."
"That's a dumb rule."
"Most rules are." I arrange the pieces and nod for him to start. "Know how each one moves?"
"Obviously." He shoves a pawn forward two squares with the conviction of a general launching an invasion. "I'm not stupid."
Something tugs at the corner of my mouth. "I can see that."
We play. He's not bad — thinks before he moves, studies the board with an intensity that's too big for his small frame. When I take his knight, his scowl could curdle milk.
"Why does the knight move in an L? That makes no sense."
"It represents a horse jumping over other pieces."
"Horses don't move in L shapes."
"No," I admit. "They don't."
"And why's the queen the most powerful? Kings are supposed to be in charge."
"Maybe the queen's just better at her job."
He considers this with a gravity that belongs to someone three times his age. "Mom says women usually are."
The lamp on the side table catches his face as he leans forward to move his bishop, and light pours across his eyes at an angle that strips away every shadow.
The left one isn't green. Not fully. It catches amber in the lamplight, warm and unmistakable, shifting the way a mood ring shifts — green at the edges, gold at the center.
My hand freezes over the board.
One green eye. One that catches amber.
I've seen those eyes every morning in the mirror for thirty years.
"Hello?" He waves his hand in front of my face. "It's your turn."
"How old are you?" The question comes out wrong — too sharp, too desperate.
He blinks at the shift. "Six. Seven in March."
Six. I left Mira seven years ago. The math doesn't crash — it detonates. A slow-motion demolition that takes out load-bearing walls.
"Does your mom..." I stop. Start again. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. "Does she have a husband? A boyfriend? Your... dad?"
His face shutters. A six-year-old who's already learned which questions build walls. "I don't have a dad. Just me and Mom." He moves his bishop without looking up. "Grandma Viv said my dad was someone who went away before I was born. She said maybe he'd come back. Mom says don't count on it."
The room tilts on its axis. The timing. The eyes. The way my grandmother taught this child chess in the same room where she taught me. The way she kept photos of me in her bedroom and left half this house to a woman she never owed anything to — except everything.
I'm looking at my son.
Six years. Six years I had a child and I didn't know. Or maybe I ran so fast, so far, that I made sure I'd never have to find out.
"You look weird," the boy says. "Are you okay?"
"Fine." The word scrapes out hollow.
"You're bad at lying." He captures my rook with a grin that rearranges his whole face. "Grandma Viv said you were famous. She had your pictures everywhere. Is chess harder than running a company?"
I can't form words. I'm staring at my son across a chessboard, and he's asking me about business like my entire life hasn't just collapsed into this small room with its old leather chair and its ghosts.
"Different," I hear myself say. "Business is about strategy. Chess is about patience."
"Which one are you better at?"
"I don't know anymore."
He studies me with those eyes — my eyes — and I wonder how Mira looked at this face every single day for six years. Whether she saw me in him every morning. Whether she hated me for it.
"You're really bad at chess," he announces, claiming another piece. "You're not paying attention at all."
He's right. I can't pay attention to anything except the years I missed. First steps. First words. First day of school. Six birthdays that happened without me because I was busy being someone who doesn't exist.
The door opens behind me and every molecule of oxygen leaves the room.
Mira stands in the doorway. Her face drains of color as she sees us — her son and the man she's been hiding him from, separated by a chessboard and six years of silence.