Chapter 2

The boy's face was a mirror that had been held up to the wrong side of seven years.

Dorian stood in the doorway of his own restaurant, the shattered glass at his feet, water dripping off his sleeve where the ice had spilled across his arm, and he could not look away from the child.

The dark hair. The shape of the jaw. The wide, quiet mouth.

He had seen that face every morning of his life for thirty years.

"Toby," Lena said, and her voice was soft but clear. "Come here. We're leaving soon."

The boy stepped off the threshold into the rain, walked across the small stretch of wet concrete, and took his mother's hand. He did not look back at the man in the doorway. He did not look at the bills scattered on the sidewalk, or the shattered glass, or the woman in the coral blouse who was staring at him with her mouth slightly open. He just stood at his mother's hand, small and still, and waited.

"The reservation," someone inside was saying. "Sir? The party of six?"

Dorian didn't hear them.

He heard his own voice, from a memory seven years old, saying words he'd rehearsed: *It's not mine. You were generous with your time.*

He heard Lena's voice, thin and tired, saying: *Dorian, I have the dates. I have the appointment records. I wasn't with anyone else.*

He heard himself saying: *Prove it.*

And he heard Lena saying: *I can't make you believe me.*

She'd left that night. She'd left with nothing — no clothes, no furniture, no the jewelry he'd bought her for anniversaries because she'd told him she didn't want to take anything he'd paid for. She'd left with the clothes on her back and a folded paper in her jacket pocket, and he'd watched her walk down the wet sidewalk toward the bus stop, and he'd felt nothing but relief.

He'd told himself she was a thief and a liar. He'd told himself the pregnancy story was a last-ditch play for his money. He'd told himself he was lucky to be rid of her.

Now the child at her hand — the child who was seven, who was *six*, who had been born six months after she left — was looking up at him with Lena's steady, quiet eyes and his own dark hair, and Dorian's knees felt strange.