Chapter 1 - Four Faces at the Sink)
Three weeks earlier, Adrian Hartwell entered the men's restroom of the Aurelia intending to rehearse a marriage proposal.
He had reserved the restaurant's smallest private room, ordered Celeste Ward's favorite champagne, and carried his grandmother's emerald ring in the inside pocket of his charcoal jacket. The proposal had been discussed by their families before it had been discussed by Adrian and Celeste. That fact should have troubled him more than it did.
He was looking at his reflection and trying to shape the right sentence when he heard four faucets running at once.
Four boys stood in a row at the marble sinks.
They wore matching navy sweaters, gray trousers, and expressions of grave concentration. One stretched on his toes to reach the soap. Another had accumulated a mountain of foam between his palms. The third was trying to turn off a faucet with his elbow. The fourth stared at Adrian through the mirror.
Adrian forgot the sentence he had planned.
The boy staring at him had Adrian's eyes.
Not merely gray eyes. There was a particular dark ring around each iris, a feature Adrian had inherited from his father. The child's left eyebrow rose slightly higher than the right. Adrian had seen that expression in photographs of himself at six.
The other three turned.
The resemblance repeated itself so precisely that Adrian felt the floor tilt beneath him.
“Hello,” said the boy with soap on his wrists. He spoke with the polite confidence of someone accustomed to explaining an unusual situation. “We are quadruplets.”
One of his brothers sighed. “People can see that, Caleb.”
“Not always,” Caleb replied.
“They can when we're dressed the same,” said the third boy.
The fourth pointed at Adrian. “He looks like us.”
Adrian gripped the edge of the marble counter. He told himself Manhattan was full of coincidences. He told himself genetics could repeat familiar shapes in strangers. Then Caleb frowned, and a shallow dimple appeared beside his mouth. Adrian's father had possessed the same dimple. Adrian had it too.
“Where is your father?” Adrian asked.
The question silenced them.
Connor, whom Adrian could identify only because Caleb glanced at him, turned off the final faucet. “We don't have one.”
“Everybody has one,” Cole said. “We just don't know ours.”
Cameron wiped his hands on his sweater, earning disapproving looks from all three brothers. “Mom says he left before we were born.”
Adrian's heartbeat became painfully loud. “What is your mother's name?”
Before any boy could answer, a woman called from beyond the restroom door.
“Boys? The manager said you came this way.”
Adrian knew the voice.
Seven years could not erase the slight huskiness in it, or the way it lifted when worry overcame restraint. He had heard that voice in a crowded college library, in a rainstorm beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and once in the darkness of his apartment saying she had something important to tell him.
Caleb brightened. “That's Mom.”
The four boys hurried out. Adrian followed as though pulled by a cord tied beneath his ribs.
Elena Voss stood beside a service station holding a tray against her hip. Her dark hair was twisted into a practical knot. The black server's uniform could not disguise the posture he remembered, or the small scar near her chin from a bicycle accident when she was twelve.
She turned.
The tray slipped. Adrian caught it before the glasses struck the floor.
“Elena?”
All expression left her face. Then fear flooded in, swift and unmistakable. She gathered the boys against her, two beneath each arm.
“You disappeared for seven years,” she said.
Adrian stared at the children. Six years old. Four identical sons. A memory surfaced with cruel clarity: Elena on his sofa seven years earlier, both hands wrapped around a mug she had not touched, asking him to come home early because she needed to tell him something. He had been summoned to London before she could.
“I never disappeared.”
His phone began ringing.
The screen showed MOTHER.
Adrian reached into his jacket. His fingers closed around the ring box intended for Celeste. Suddenly its weight seemed obscene. He pulled it out, stared at the emerald for half a second, then shut his fist around it.
Elena watched the gesture. Pain crossed her face before she could hide it.
“Then somebody lied to us,” she said.
The phone continued to ring.
Adrian declined the call.
It rang again immediately.
One of the boys, Cole, leaned toward his brothers. “Maybe she knows he found us.”
“Who?” Adrian asked.
Elena's grip tightened on the boys' shoulders. “We need to leave.”
The restaurant manager approached, his courteous smile strained. “Elena, your table has been waiting eight minutes.”
“I know. I'm sorry.”
“And children are not permitted in the service area.”
“Their sitter canceled. They were in the staff room with homework.”
Adrian recognized the man's deference when the manager looked at him. Hartwell money had renovated the Aurelia's west dining hall. His mother's charity gala would occupy it in three weeks.
“Give her the rest of the night off,” Adrian said.
Elena's eyes flashed. “Do not manage my life.”
“I am trying to understand it.”
“Seven years too late.”
Caleb looked from one adult to the other. “Do you know our mom?”
Adrian crouched so he was level with the boys. Every instinct told him not to frighten them with an impossible truth. Every lost year told him silence had already done enough damage.
“I knew her a long time ago,” he said. “She was the bravest person I had ever met.”
Elena's anger faltered.
Cameron studied Adrian's face. “Were you her boyfriend?”
“Cameron,” Elena warned.
“She has a picture,” he continued. “In the blue box.”
Connor elbowed him.
Adrian stood slowly. “What picture?”
Elena pulled a coat from beneath the service counter. “Not here.”
Adrian offered to take them home. She refused. He offered to call a car. She refused that too. Finally, because the boys were tired and rain battered the tall windows, she allowed him to walk them to the subway entrance.
They passed the private room where Celeste waited.
Through the half-open door, Adrian saw her seated beneath a spray of white orchids. A waiter stood beside the unopened champagne. Celeste saw Adrian, then saw Elena and the boys. Her gaze dropped to the ring box still in his hand.
Adrian stopped.
Celeste rose with extraordinary calm. She was thirty-four, a museum attorney, and far kinder than the arrangement between their families deserved. She came into the corridor and looked carefully at the four children.
“So this is why you missed dinner,” she said.
“I can explain.”
“Can you?”
“Not yet.”
Celeste nodded once. “Then do not propose to me tonight.”
Elena turned away, embarrassed by an intimacy she had never asked to witness.
Adrian gave Celeste the only honest answer available. “I wasn't going to after I saw them.”
“Good.” Her eyes glistened, but her voice remained level. “That would have been cruel.”
She walked back into the room and closed the door.
Adrian followed Elena and the boys downstairs. At the subway entrance, Elena faced him beneath the awning.
“Do not come after us,” she said.
“Are they mine?”
She looked at the boys. Caleb was pretending not to listen. Connor had stopped pretending. Cole and Cameron stood perfectly still.
“They were yours before you abandoned them.”
“I did not abandon anyone.”
“I called you nineteen times. Your number changed. Your apartment was empty. Your office said you had moved to London permanently. Then I received your message.”
“What message?”
Elena laughed once, without humor. “The one that said a child would ruin your future. The one that offered me money to make the problem disappear.”
Adrian felt rain blow beneath the awning and strike his face.
“I never knew you were pregnant.”
Elena searched his expression. For one dangerous second, hope appeared in hers.
Then a black town car stopped at the curb.
The rear window lowered.
Evelyn Hartwell sat inside.
May you like
She looked at Elena. She looked at the four boys. Her face did not register surprise.
“Adrian,” she said through the open window, “get in the car.”
