The text exchange with Maya mocks me from my phone screen.
Me: Can you babysit Aria for the weekend? Pretty please? There's this shindig I'm not allowed to skip, and I don't want to tag her along.
Maya: is it because of your new boss?
Me: I haven't said anything.
Maya: noted. but yeah, no, im out of town. good luck, babe!
So here I am. At a mandatory corporate retreat in the Catskills.
Watching Aria demolish a relay race while Caspian Rothwell exists in my peripheral vision like a constant gravitational pull I'm trying to resist.
He's everywhere.
Playing charming CEO for the families, shaking hands with department heads. Yet I feel his attention tracking me across the lawn. Feel it the way you feel someone's gaze burning into your spine even when you're not looking.
I've positioned myself on the sidelines of the parent-child races. Far enough to avoid interaction, close enough to supervise.
Aria's in the middle of a sack race, her small body somehow achieving velocities that defy physics. She crosses the finish line first, then immediately marches over to the event coordinator.
"Excuse me," her six-year-old voice pipes up across the field. "but this race is ageist. Tall kids have an unfair advantage. If you're gonna make it fair, then short kids should get shorter sacks. That's just math!"
I watch her argue, gesturing with the same hand movements I use in presentations, and something in my chest clenches. She's so much mine.
But also, increasingly and undeniably, his.
"She's terrifying." The voice beside me makes every nerve ending fire. "I mean that as a compliment."
I don't turn. Don't look at him.
If I look, I'll see those grey eyes—Aria's eyes—and the birthmark. And all the evidence I've been trying to unsee for days.
"She gets it from me."
"I don't doubt it." There's warmth in his voice.
Something that sounds almost like pride, which is absurd because he doesn't know. Doesn't know she's his to be proud of.
We stand in silence, watching Aria convince the coordinator to modify the rules. The moment stretches, comfortable in a way that terrifies me more than our usual verbal warfare.
This is worse. This quiet coexistence.
Like we're two parents watching their child together. Like we're something we're not.
"Does she get it from someone of your side?" His voice has shifted. Careful now. "The eye color I mean."
My heart stops functioning. Actually stops, my pulse a staccato panic in my throat. "My mother had grey eyes."
The lie tastes like ash. My mother's eyes were brown. Warm and tired and brown.
Just like mine.
"Hmm." He's still watching Aria. "What about that birthmark? The little one by her left eye? It’s… cute"
I can feel my composure cracking. Can feel the careful walls I've built starting to fracture under the weight of his casual interrogation. "Genetic lottery. Why the interrogation, Rothwell?"
"After all this time," his tone shifts, becomes something more serious that makes my stomach drop, "you've never once mentioned her father. Not once."
The world tilts. I need to move, need to escape before he sees too much, before my face betrays what I've spent weeks hiding. "Because he’s not in our lives. He's not relevant."
"Isn't he?"
Two words. Just two words, but they land like an accusation. Like he knows something, suspects something, is circling closer to a truth that will detonate everything.
I start to walk away—my usual escape route, the coward's exit I've perfected—but his hand catches my wrist.
Gently. Not restraining, just... stopping me.
The touch sends electricity up my arm, and I hate my body for responding. Hate that after seven years, his skin on mine still feels like something I remember in my bones.
"I'm not trying to pry, Serena." His voice is low, frustrated. "I'm trying to—"
He stops. Can't find the words, and the uncertainty in him mirrors something in me.
I should pull away. Should retreat into our old dynamic where everything is combat and nothing is vulnerability.
Instead, I hear myself say: "Trying to what? Finally beat me at something? Figure out my weakness?"
"Maybe I'm trying to figure out if we're still enemies or if somewhere in the recent time that changed."
The words hang between us, dangerous and honest. I feel the question beneath them—the real question he's not asking. About what we could be, what we've always been dancing around.
My pulse is racing. I'm hyperaware of his fingers still circling my wrist. His thumb resting against the place where my heartbeat betrays me.
"Some things don't change, Cas." I force the words out, force myself to rebuild the walls. "You're still the legacy prince. I'm still the scholarship girl fighting for scraps. The acquisition doesn't change that."
It's a lie. Everything has changed. But the lie is safer than the truth.
"Mommy!" Aria's voice shatters the moment.
She's running toward us, breathless and triumphant, her face flushed with victory.
Caspian drops my wrist immediately, steps back to create an appropriate distance. But I can still feel the ghost of his touch, the warmth of his skin against mine.
"I won!" Aria announces. "They changed the rules and I still won!"
"I saw, baby. You were amazing."
She notices Caspian for the first time, and her expression shifts to something delighted. "Oh. Hi, Mr. Serious Boss!"
"Hi, Aria the Terrible." He crouches down to her level, and watching him fold his tall frame to meet her eyes does something painful to my chest. "Heard you conquered through superior legal arguments."
"It wasn't legal, it was logical." She's indignant. "It’s different."
"My mistake." His smile is genuine, and I've never seen him look at anyone else this way. "You're absolutely right."
They have a rapport. An easy, natural dynamic that shouldn't exist but does.
I watch them together and feel something crack open in my chest—longing mixed with terror mixed with grief for what they could have if I were braver.
Aria studies his face with the unnerving intensity she reserves for puzzles. "You have a baby picture face."
"Aria…"
"Like, your face looks like it was cute when you were little. Mommy does too."
Caspian laughs, surprised and genuine. "I'll take that as a compliment?"
"It is. It means you have good face genes." She nods seriously. "For babies."
The words land like a grenade in silence.
I watch Caspian's expression change. Not understanding, but aware that something just happened. Something significant that he can't quite grasp.
His eyes flick to me, searching, and I see the gears turning behind his gaze.
"Go get a snack, baby." I keep my voice steady through sheer force of will. "The table has those cookies with chocolate chips that you like."
Aria runs off, oblivious to the bomb she just detonated, and I'm left standing with Caspian while that observation hangs in the air between us.
"Good face genes for babies." He's watching me too carefully now. "That's... specific."
"She's six. She says weird things. Watching a lot of Discovery programs perhaps." The deflection is weak and we both know it.
"Does she?" He steps closer, and I realize I've backed myself against a tree.
His voice has gone soft. Dangerous. The kind of softness that strips away pretense and leaves you exposed.
I can feel my pulse in my throat. In my wrists. In places I shouldn't be aware of while standing three feet from my daughter's father who doesn't know he's her father.
"I should supervise—" I start to move past him.
"You do that a lot." Not an accusation. Just an observation that cuts deeper than any blade. "Change the subject. Leave the room. When things get too close to... something."
"Maybe I have good reasons."
"Maybe."
He doesn't move, doesn't try to stop me this time. Just looks at me with those grey eyes and I feel seen in a way that makes me want to run.
"But eventually we're going to have to finish one of these conversations, siren."