PART 1: Four Faces in the Lobby
At 4:00 p.m., I was supposed to marry Vivienne Crane in the grand ballroom of the Hale Grand Chicago, the hotel my great-grandfather had built and my father still ruled like a kingdom. At 3:17 p.m., I was standing in the lobby in a navy tuxedo, staring at four six-year-old boys who had my face.
They wore matching camel blazers over cream sweaters, and they were whispering about whether the chandelier would fall if someone sneezed loudly enough.
One of them tugged his left earlobe while he thought. Then he did it again.
My stomach turned over. I had done that since kindergarten. My mother used to tease me that it was how she always knew I was lying.
I bent down before I could stop myself.
“Are you boys lost?”
The one on the end studied me with serious gray eyes. “No. Mom is bringing the flowers. We’re supposed to stand still and not touch anything.”
“How old are you?”
“Six and three quarters,” another one said proudly. “All of us. We’re quadruplets.”
Six and three quarters. I did the math without wanting to, and it landed squarely on the summer I had spent in Savannah with Claire Bennett.
Seven years earlier, I had loved her more than I had ever loved anything with my last name on it. Claire was a florist, the daughter of a woman who ran a small plant nursery outside the city. She laughed at five-star hotels, she said exactly what she thought, and she had no patience at all for the games the Hales played.
She was the only woman for whom I would have walked away from the empire. She was also the woman who had ended everything with a single letter and vanished.
A woman’s voice rang out behind me. “Oliver! Jack! Leo! Finn! I said by the pillar, not under the piano!”
I knew that voice.
She came through the revolving door carrying an enormous arrangement of white peonies, and then she saw me and stopped dead on the marble.
She had changed. Her auburn hair was shorter, her face thinner, and there was a tired steadiness in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. But she still bit the inside of her cheek when she was frightened.
The arrangement tipped. A bellman caught it just in time.
Finn, the smallest, looked from me to his mother. “Mom, he looks like the man in the picture you keep in your recipe book.”
“Finn,” Claire whispered.
“The one where you’re both soaking wet from the rain and laughing.”
The other three began to inspect me like a science project. “He has Leo’s ears,” Jack announced. “I don’t have ears like that,” Leo protested. “Everybody has ears,” Oliver said.
I felt the floor tilt beneath me.
“Claire.”
She set her jaw. “Boys, coats. We’re going.”
“Are they mine?”
“Not here, Sebastian.”
“One word. Just tell me. Are they mine?”
Her eyes filled, but her voice didn’t shake. “You don’t get to stand in your father’s hotel and act like you’ve spent seven years searching for us.”
I went still. “Searching? You’re the one who wrote that you never wanted to see me again.”
Her expression shifted. “I wrote that?”
Before I could answer, she gathered the boys’ hands. Oliver twisted around. “Mom… is he our dad?” Claire didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.
My phone started buzzing. My best man. The wedding planner. My father.
Upstairs, three hundred guests were waiting, along with a senator, a string quartet, two families’ worth of investors, and a ring in my breast pocket that cost more than most people’s houses.
I touched the velvet box and watched Claire lead four boys with my eyes, my ears, and my nervous habit out through the revolving door.
At 3:41 p.m., I knocked on the bridal suite. Vivienne was alone at the window, already in her gown.
“I can’t do this,” I said. She didn’t look surprised, and that frightened me more than anger would have.
“Is it someone else?” I told her the truth: Claire Bennett, and four boys in the lobby.
Vivienne slowly set her earrings down on the vanity. “I know.”
“How could you possibly know?”
She met my eyes. “Because I’m the one who hired her to do our flowers.”
