Chapter 5 - The Confession in Room 904
By four o'clock that afternoon, I had left the girls in the care of a trusted nanny I had vetted myself, and I was standing outside Room 904 at Swedish Cherry Hill.
My reflection in the mirrored glass door looked haggard. The lines around my eyes were deeper than they had been twenty-four hours ago.
I turned the brass handle and stepped inside.
The room was quiet, save for the rhythmic, soft whoosh of an IV drip and the low hum of city traffic floating up from Broadway. Sloan was sitting up against a mound of white pillows, her dark hair pulled back into a loose knot. She was wearing a plain hospital gown, her face pale, but her eyes—those sharp, brilliant eyes that had once mapped out the architecture of my entire life—were wide open and fixed on the door.
She didn't look surprised to see me. She looked like a woman who had been waiting at a bus stop for a decade, knowing the bus would eventually arrive, even if the bridge had collapsed behind it.
"You broke my favorite coffee cup downstairs," she said. Her voice was raspy, like dry parchment, but the old iron was still in the tone.
I closed the door behind me, locking it with a sharp click. I walked over to the side of the bed, my hands shoved deep into my pockets so she wouldn't see them shaking.
"You left a two-million-dollar paper trail in Zurich, Sloan," I said quietly. "For a woman who supposedly wanted nothing to do with me, you had a strange way of keeping me involved in your real estate portfolio."
Sloan looked down at her thin hands, tracing the pale skin over her knuckles. "You were going to sign the acquisition over to me on our anniversary. You forgot. You were so busy looking at spreadsheets and talking to venture capitalists that you didn't notice I had already packed my bags."
"Because I wanted to buy us a house!" I snapped, the frustration of ten years finally cracking through the professional armor. "I wanted us out of that rat-infested basement in Capitol Hill! I wanted to give you everything you deserved after you starved yourself through my college years!"
"I didn't want a mansion, Griffin," she whispered, and for the first time, her voice broke. A single tear slipped down her cheek, catching the afternoon light before sinking into the white pillowcase. "I wanted you. Just you. Not the man who checked his phone during dinner. Not the man who was already measuring his worth by the zero count in his bank account. When I found out I was pregnant... I realized that if I stayed, our children would be raised by a ghost who lived in an office."
The silence in the room became so heavy I could hear the blood roaring in my ears.
"Twins," I said, my voice dropping to a rough gravel. "You had my children, and you didn't even send a postcard."
"I sent you a piece of me every day," she said, looking up, her gaze locking onto mine with terrifying clarity. "Every time you closed a multi-million-dollar deal, every time your face was on the cover of Seattle Business Journal, I looked at Hazel and Iris and saw your stubborn jaw staring back at me. I didn't need to send a postcard. You were already everywhere."
I stepped closer to the bed, leaning over until my face was inches from hers. I could smell the familiar scent of her skin—vanilla and old paper—even beneath the sterile hospital antiseptics.
"They called me at 2:47 in the morning, Sloan," I said, my voice thick with a mixture of rage and overwhelming, suffocating relief. "They were terrified. They thought you were dying. And the first thing Hazel asked me was whether I was their father because she found a picture of us in a drawer with two hospital bracelets."
Sloan closed her eyes, letting out a long, shuddering breath. "I kept the box."
"You're coming home with me," I said, and it wasn't a question, nor a negotiation. It was a decree from a man who had finally reclaimed his throne. "Both of you. All three of you."
May you like
She opened her eyes, a faint, tired smile touching the corners of her mouth. "You haven't changed at all, Griffin Drake. You still think you can buy and sell a family."
"I'm not buying anything," I murmured, reaching out to gently touch a strand of silver-threaded hair away from her forehead. Her skin was warm beneath my fingertips. "I'm just collecting what was mine from the very beginning."
