Page 13

"Darren?" his mother asked. "Are you alright?"

No. I wasn't alright. I wasn't even in the same zip code as alright.

"I need to go," I whispered.

"Darren - "

"I need to go." I ended the call before they could say anything else. For several minutes, I sat completely still with the phone in my hand, tears running down my face. My whole body felt exhausted, as if I'd been running for miles, yet my heart wouldn't stop pounding.

I wiped my face and looked toward the stairs. The boys were still upstairs. Laura was still sleeping in her bassinet beside me. Somewhere behind me, I heard the soft click of claws against the kitchen floor, and Skye came padding into the room, her golden plumed tail wagging hopefully as she looked up at me.

She was only six months old, still all oversized paws and puppy enthusiasm, and she'd been Philip's idea when we'd decided the boys were old enough to help raise a dog. I'd picked her up from the breeder with him, and we'd spent the drive home arguing over names before Evan had suggested Skye. When I'd gone to pick her up from the pet hotel after everything happened, she'd been overjoyed to see me, practically climbing into my arms and covering my face with frantic puppy kisses as I sat on the floor to greet her. But once we'd gotten home, she'd kept looking for Philip. She'd checked the front door every time she heard a noise outside, wandered through the rooms, and gone to the places where she'd normally find him. She didn't understand where he had gone any more than the boys did.

Now she looked at me as if nothing in the world had changed, as if I was still the same Daddy who had walked her that morning, filled her food bowl, and laughed when she'd stolen one of Matt's toy cars.

I crouched down and pulled her against me, burying my face in the soft fur at the side of her neck. She immediately licked my cheek, her tail thumping against the cabinets, and a broken laugh escaped me through the tears.

"You need me, too, don't you, girl?"

Skye licked me again, apparently satisfied that she'd solved whatever problem was making me cry. For a moment, I just held her. The boys needed me. Laura needed me. Skye needed me. They were all still here, still exactly who I'd believed they were, and none of them had done anything wrong. That was the one thing I could still understand.

I took a shaky breath and reached for my phone again. If Philip had his lawyer, I needed one of my own. Not one his parents had found. Not someone whose first concern was protecting Philip from the consequences of what he'd done. Mine. Someone who would look at the financial records, the apartment, the children's circumstances, and everything else investigators were uncovering and tell me what my rights were. Someone who was there for me.

I stared at the screen for several seconds before opening the browser on my phone.

I'm done.

The realization didn't feel triumphant. It felt like grief. I still loved Philip, that was the awful part. I loved the man I'd thought he was, the father he'd been to our children, the husband I'd believed I had. But I was finally beginning to understand that loving him didn't mean I had to keep letting him destroy me.

I needed to protect myself and my children. And for the first time since Philip's arrest, I stopped thinking about what would happen to him and only started thinking about what would happen to us.

5

DARREN

The next four months passed in a blur.

By early April, Philip had been prosecuted, George Stanley had agreed to testify against him, and the government had offered George a ten-year sentence in exchange for his cooperation. George had been the one person Philip had apparently trusted enough to build a second life with, and somehow that made his decision to testify hurt almost as much as everything else.

Philip had finally stopped fighting. His lawyer told me that Philip had decided to plead guilty rather than put me and the children through a trial. He didn't want us sitting in a courtroom for weeks while prosecutors laid out every detail of what he'd done. I didn't know whether to be grateful. Part of me was, but another part wanted to scream that Philip should have thought about us before he'd stolen the money, before he'd maintained affairs, before he'd created a second home, before he'd lied to me about the children's mothers and his own paternity, and before he'd done any of the other myriad things that had brought us here. Instead, he was pleading guilty now because he didn't want to hurt us with a trial, as if the trial was the thing that had harmed us irrevocably.

Philip was sentenced to twenty-five years. At thirty-four, it was a chunk of time longer than I'd been an adult, or Philip, for that matter. Twenty-five years was also longer than Evan and Matt had been alive, and long enough that Laura wouldn't remember Philip as anything more than a man in photographs by the time he was eligible to come home. I'd heard the number before, but it didn't really sink in until I saw the sentence on paper. I stared at it for a long time, then signed the divorce paperwork.

The divorce happened far more quickly than I'd ever expected, largely because Felicity Barnes and the senior partners at the firm had decided that Philip's crimes were not going to be allowed to destroy me and the children any further. Felicity had been Philip's boss and one of the firm's senior partners for years, and she'd been there when he was arrested. She'd seen the children crying, seen my face, and watched the devastation spread through what had once been an ordinary family. She'd also known something I hadn't understood yet: the firm had handled all three of our adoptions, including Evan's and Matt's, and the circumstances surrounding those first two were now part of the criminal investigation.

Once the senior partners knew the full scope of the case, they understood exactly how bad the optics were. Two young women who had worked as interns at their firm had given birth to children Philip had apparently fathered during affairs with them. Then there was George, Philip's long-term boyfriend and PA at the same firm. Whatever Philip had done privately, the firm was now uncomfortably close to almost every part of the story, and there was no way around the fact that the firm's reputation was going to suffer from it.

But that wasn't the only reason Felicity called me. She and the other senior partners genuinely wanted to make sure that the people Philip had hurt weren't victimized again because of him. If helping me protect the children also helped demonstrate that the firm was taking responsibility for its side of the mess, so be it. They couldn't undo what Philip had done, but they could make sure their resources were used to help clean up what they could.

“What are you going to do now, Darren?” Felicity asked when she reached out to me.

I was sitting across from her in one of the firm's conference rooms, exhausted after another meeting, another explanation, another piece of Philip's life being laid out in front of me. I rubbed my hands over my face and stared at the table. “I don't know. I've spent four months dealing with what Philip did, and I honestly don't know what I'm supposed to do next.”

Felicity studied me for a moment, and there was something different in her expression from the last time I'd seen her at the arrest. “You don't have to figure it all out by yourself. I was there when Philip was arrested, Darren. I saw you with those children. I saw what this did to all of you, and I've had to sit through every meeting since then knowing that our firm handled your adoptions and that our name is now attached to parts of this mess. The senior partners know everything now. We can't change what Philip did, but we can make sure you and those children don't suffer more than you already have because of it.”

I looked up at her. “I don't know what I can afford,” I said. “The house is gone. The accounts are tied up. I don't even know what my financial situation is going to look like when all of this is finished.”

“Then don't worry about that right now,” she said. “I'm offering you my services pro bono. I've already discussed it with the other partners, and we all agree. I'll handle the divorce, the custody issues, and Laura's adoption. You shouldn't have to find another lawyer and start explaining this entire nightmare to someone who wasn't there. I know the adoption files. I know the history. I know what happened with Evan and Matt, and I know exactly what we're dealing with now.”