Chapter 1

My eighteen-year-old son had recently started seeing someone.

I hadn’t planned to interfere.

Not until that night.

It was well past midnight when a faint voice drifted through the wall from the room next to mine.

I pulled on a robe and stepped into the hallway.

Through the narrow crack in his door, I heard my son speak in a soft, tender voice I had never heard him use before.

“I miss you.”

A woman answered on the other end.

Her voice was low and husky, with the calm confidence and casual ease of someone much older.

No matter how I listened to it, she did not sound like an eighteen-year-old girl.

She sounded at least forty.

My heart dropped.

Heat rushed to my head as shock, anger, disbelief, and a fear I could not control crashed over me all at once.

My son had only just turned eighteen.

He was still in his final year of high school.

The woman on the phone had to be at least twenty years older than him.

Why would a woman like that target a boy who had barely become an adult?

The next day, while he was in the shower, I picked up his phone with trembling hands.

The moment I entered the correct passcode, the screen lit up.

At the top of his messages was a pinned conversation with no name attached.

I opened the profile.

A woman’s side profile filled the screen.

In the dim light, she held a glass of red wine. Her features were elegant and cool, her expression distant.

The instant I saw her, a powerful sense of recognition struck me.

That face.

That profile.

Even the detached way she carried herself.

I had seen her somewhere before.

I was certain of it.

She looked painfully familiar.

But no matter how hard I searched my memory, the name stayed just out of reach.

It was right there.

And yet I could not place her.

Clenching my jaw, I forced down the questions twisting inside me and memorized the unfamiliar phone number.

The next morning, dawn had barely begun to break.

When I heard his bedroom door open quietly, I grabbed my coat and followed him out of the house.

A black sedan sat quietly at the curb.

I waited, but my son never came back out.

Something in my gut told me not to leave.

I pushed open the car door and hurried into the lobby of the luxury apartment building overlooking the river.

Years in the corporate world had taught me how to read a situation and move quickly. With a little luck, I slipped into the elevator behind a group of building staff and delivery workers.

At the rooftop café, I finally saw the woman who had kept me awake all night.

She was sitting behind a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass.

Sunlight fell across her face.

In that instant, all the air left my lungs.

She was not some cheap seductress.

Nor did she look like a scammer trying to trap a naive young man.

She wore a sharply tailored silk blouse. Age had not diminished her beauty. If anything, it had given her an elegance so commanding that it was almost intimidating.

And my son—

The proud, spoiled boy who still asked me to bring him a bottle of water when he was at home—

was carefully pulling out her chair.

The woman leaned forward and brushed one long finger across his cheek as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

They sat close together, murmuring to each other.

The sunlight wrapped around them, turning the scene into something so intimate that it hurt to look at.

Then my son reached into his backpack and took out an elegant velvet box.

He offered it to her with both hands.

She opened it, glanced inside, and smiled with indulgent satisfaction.

Something inside me snapped.

The gift.

The familiar touch.

The way they acted as though no one else existed.

They were together.

There was no denying it now.

My whole body began to shake. Nausea rolled through me as I stepped forward, ready to storm inside and tear the truth out of them.

Then the woman seemed to sense my presence.

She suddenly lifted her head and looked straight in my direction.