Jocelyn’s POV
I don't remember getting to my car.
One moment I'm standing in that hallway with the sandwich I brought for my husband lying forgotten on expensive carpet, and the next I'm gripping my steering wheel hard enough to make my knuckles white.
The parking garage is too quiet, still. Like the world is holding its breath, waiting to see if I'll scream or cry or just sit here until I turn to stone.
Eight years.
The number keeps circling through my head like a vulture. Eight years of knowing, eight years of lying, eight years of looking into my eyes every morning and pretending to be someone he wasn't.
Mia is six years old.
The math is simple, brutal. He knew about Eli before she was even conceived.
Before that night at the gala when I wore the silver dress and thought I was meeting someone who could save me. Before I got pregnant and terrified, trying to figure out how to tell him I was carrying his child.
He'd already been hiding one.
My hands shake. I clench them tighter around the wheel, but it doesn't help. The trembling moves up my arms, into my chest, spreading like poison through my entire body.
I need to move, need to drive somewhere. Anywhere.
The foundation appears through my windshield before I consciously decide to go there. Muscle memory, maybe. Or instinct. The building Zayden and I built together, our names side by side on the entrance plaque.
Wolfe-Hartwell Foundation.
The hyphen between our names suddenly feels like a lie.
Inside, everything looks exactly as I left it this morning. The photos on the walls documenting our work. The mission statement we wrote together, framed above the reception desk. Words about transparency and truth and helping families stay together.
The irony tastes like copper on my tongue, like blood.
"Mrs. Wolfe?" Diane at reception looks up from her computer. "I thought you had the day off—are you okay?"
I must look worse than I thought. My reflection in the glass doors shows a woman who's aged ten years in the last hour. Skin too pale, eyes too wide, hair disheveled from running my hands through it too many times.
"I need Helena." My voice sounds strange, distant, like it's coming from underwater. "Is she here?"
"Conference room two, but she's in a meeting—"
I'm already moving down the hallway, past volunteers who glance up and then quickly away, sensing something wrong in the way I'm walking. The way I'm holding myself together with willpower and spite.
Helena sees me through the glass wall and her expression changes instantly. She says something to the three people at the table—program coordinators, I think, though I can't focus enough to be sure—and they gather their things quickly.
The door opens. Someone passes me with a murmured "Mrs. Wolfe" that I don't acknowledge.
Then it's just Helena and me in a room that suddenly feels too small.
"What happened?" She closes the door. Guides me to a chair with gentle pressure on my elbow. "Jocelyn, you're scaring me. What happened?"
The words won't come at first. They're stuck somewhere in my throat, tangled up with all the screaming I'm not letting myself do.
"He has a son." It comes out flat, emotionless. "Eight years old. Zayden has a son named Eli that he's known about for eight years and never told me."
Helena's face goes very still. "What?!"
"A woman showed up at his office today—she’s dying. Cancer. Brought the boy with her." I'm reciting facts like a police report. If I let myself feel this, I'll break. "Eight years old, Helena. Do you understand what that means?"
She sinks into the chair across from me. "He knew before Mia…"
"Before everything." My voice cracks. "Before the gala, before I got pregnant, before he convinced me he'd changed. He knew he had a son out there that he'd paid the mother to hide, and he looked at me every single day and pretended he was someone different."
The tears come then, hot and angry, streaming down my face before I can stop them. I hate crying, hate the weakness of it, but my body doesn't care what I hate.
Helena moves her chair closer, takes my hands in hers. "Tell me everything."
So I do, the whole pathetic story spills out—the woman's name is Natasha, the boy looks just like him, the DNA test she brought as proof. The way Zayden's face looked when I asked how long he'd known.
That terrible moment when he said "eight years" and everything I thought was real revealed itself as performance.
"He paid her off." The words taste like poison. "Monthly payments through shell corporations. NDAs. The whole corporate machinery of making inconvenient people disappear. Just like—"
I stop, but Helena knows what I was going to say. Just like he could have done to me.
"Did he ever..." Helena's voice is careful, gentle. "Did he ever draw up papers for you? Contracts?"
"I don't know." The admission makes me nauseous. "I never looked, never thought to look because I trusted him. Because I believed him when he said he'd changed."
Helena squeezes my hands.
"Jocelyn, listen to me. You need to think clearly right now. I know you're hurt, I know you want to burn everything down, but you have Mia to think about. Custody, assets, the foundation—you need to be smart about this."
"Smart?" A laugh escapes my throat—sharp, broken. "I've been the opposite of smart for three years. I married a man who's been lying to me since the beginning. How much smarter can I get?"
"By not making decisions when you're this angry." She releases my hands, leans back. "Go home. Don't talk to him tonight. Sleep on it. Tomorrow, when you can think straight, then you decide what comes next."
I set my phone on the table between us, face down, like burying something dead. I can't look at it anymore—can't stomach whatever else Zayden might be sending from his glass tower of lies.
Helena reaches for it reflexively, the way she reaches for anything I discard when I'm spiraling. She turns it over just as the screen lights up one last time—a final death rattle of technology trying to deliver one more message before the battery gives out completely.
Her face goes white.
"What?" The word comes out sharp. "Helena, what does it say?"
She turns the screen toward me. I read the text through the spiderweb cracks spreading across the glass.
She was at the gala. Natasha was there that night. Pregnant with my son. Watching me with you.
The foundation's walls press in around me. My vision tunnels.
Somewhere far away, I hear Helena's voice calling my name, but I'm already gone, falling through space and time to a memory of myself in a silver dress, laughing at something Zayden said while a woman I'd never noticed stood in the background, pregnant and watching.
Her hatred sharp enough to cut through crystal chandeliers and champagne bubbles and every beautiful lie I've ever believed.