Chapter 4

The first thing Dorian did was find the folder.

He went through the new safe, the old file cabinet in the office, the box of loose papers in the bottom drawer of his desk. Ten minutes of scrambling, his hands shaking, his knuckles catching on the metal edges of drawers, and then — behind a stack of health inspection reports from a city inspection three years ago — his fingers closed on a thick cream envelope.

The registered mail sticker was still on the front.

His own signature was still on the sticker.

*Dorian Ash,* it read, in his own hand, the one he'd signed without thinking, the one he'd scrawled across a clipboard at the front door of his own restaurant while the mail carrier waited.

He hadn't opened it.

He'd never opened it.

Seven years. He'd kept this envelope like a talisman, like a stone in his shoe that he refused to remove because removing it would mean admitting it was there. He'd moved it from the safe to the desk drawer to the file cabinet. He'd carried it through the reno when they'd expanded the dining room. He'd told Marielle it was legal matter, told himself it was evidence, told anyone who asked that it was nothing.

Now he sat in his office, the fluorescent light humming overhead, the restaurant's dinner service going on without him in the next room, and he looked at the envelope.

His name was on it. Her handwriting was on it.

*Dorian,* it said on the front, in her neat, rounded hand. *Please open this. -L*

His hands were shaking.

"I can't do this," he said to the empty room. "I can't — "

He opened it.

The ultrasound was inside. The black-and-white image of a small, curled shape, the technician's annotations in the margin. The date stamp in the corner. The name field at the top: *Lena Ash*. The gestational age in the corner: *27 weeks, 4 days*.

He'd known.

He'd always known.

He set the ultrasound down on the desk, and he looked at it for a long time, and then he looked through the rest of the contents of the envelope. There was a letter, two pages, in her handwriting. There was a copy of the clinic's records. There was a page with a notary stamp, and a signature he recognized — the notary public who worked at the bank he used, the one who'd stamped his mortgage papers.

And there was a photocopy of a birth certificate.