A Billionaire Stormed Into the Hospital Ready to Destroy His Ex-Wife—Then She Placed Two Newborns in His Arms and Revealed a Secret That Changed Everything

PART 2

“You’re already their father.”

The words were still hanging in the air when the hospital door swung open and a doctor rushed in, a folder clutched in her hand and urgency written across her face.

“Ms. Vexley, I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, then stopped short when she saw me standing there with a newborn in each arm. “Mr. Vexley. Good. You’re here. You both need to hear this, and you need to hear it now, because there’s a man downstairs at the front desk claiming to be the father of these children and demanding access to them.”

I felt Sylvie go rigid in the bed.

“What man?” I asked.

The doctor glanced at Sylvie, then at me. “He gave the name Adrian Cole. He’s been very aggressive. Security is holding him for now, but he’s claiming paternity and threatening legal action if we don’t release the infants to him.”

The name meant nothing to me, but it clearly meant something to Sylvie. The color drained from her face.

“He can’t be here,” she whispered. “He can’t be. I never told him where—”

“Sylvie.” I crossed to the bed, still holding the babies, and sat carefully on the edge of it. “What is going on? Who is Adrian Cole, and why did you just tell me I’m the father of these children when you and I have been divorced for seven months and haven’t, we haven’t been together in over a year?”

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were full of a truth she had clearly been carrying alone for a long time.

“These babies were conceived through IVF,” she said quietly. “Before the divorce. Do you remember, two years ago, when we were still trying? When we did the consultations, the harvesting, the, all of it?”

I remembered. We had wanted children desperately, in the early years, before the marriage curdled into long hours and arguments and pride. We had gone through rounds of fertility treatment. We had frozen embryos. Our embryos. Mine and Sylvie’s.

“We had embryos frozen,” I said slowly. “At the clinic.”

“Eight of them,” Sylvie said. “Ours. Yours and mine, Damon. And when the divorce happened, when everything fell apart, I, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy them. They were the last thing we made together when we still loved each other. I paid to keep them stored. I told myself I’d decide later.” Her voice cracked. “And then, after the divorce, I realized I was thirty-eight and I might never get another chance to be a mother. And I had eight embryos that were half mine. So I made a decision. I had them implanted. Without telling you, because we were divorced, because I thought I had no right to ask you for anything, because I was too proud and too hurt.” She looked at the babies in my arms. “They’re ours, Damon. Yours and mine. Biologically, legally, in every way. You’re already their father. That’s what I meant. Not a figure of speech. The literal truth.”

I looked down at the two tiny faces. The one with dark hair, the one with the familiar wrinkle between her brows, the wrinkle I now realized I had seen in my own baby pictures.

My children. Mine and Sylvie’s. Made from the love we’d had before we ruined it.

I thought about those embryos, frozen in a clinic for the years our marriage was dying. We had created them in the early days, when we still believed in us, when we still stayed up late talking about the family we’d build. We had wanted them so badly, back then. And then the wanting had curdled into pride and distance and fourteen-hour days and arguments that never resolved, and we had let it all fall apart. The embryos had stayed frozen, the last evidence that we had once loved each other enough to want to make people out of that love. Sylvie had not been able to destroy them. I understood that now, holding them. Neither could I have.

“Then who,” I asked, my voice very quiet, “is Adrian Cole, and why does he think he’s their father?”