Three years. Three thousand days. Kairos Vance had searched through every face, every crowd, every shadow, looking for a ghost he wasn't sure still lived. And then she walked into his office like she owned it.
The coffee in his hand had gone cold hours ago, forgotten like so many things in the blur of sleepless nights and exhaustive searches. Six AM sunlight cut through the floor-to-ceiling windows of his penthouse office, painting the city below in shades of gold and amber. Beautiful. Empty. Like everything else in his carefully constructed world.
Kairos didn't look up from the hiring file on his desk—the hundredth he'd reviewed this month, maybe the thousandth this year. Another nanny candidate. Another inevitable failure. Leo wouldn't bond with any of them. The boy had been silent for three years, locked in a prison of his own making, and no amount of money or credentials or patience could break through those walls.
Dark circles shadowed Kairos's eyes, evidence of too many nights spent staring at his son's closed bedroom door, wondering if the child would ever speak again. If he would ever smile. If he would ever be anything more than a living reminder of everything Kairos had destroyed.
A sharp knock interrupted his thoughts.
"Mr. Vance?" His assistant's voice filtered through the intercom, professionally neutral as always. "The new candidate is here."
Kairos barely glanced up, his voice flat with the weight of three years' worth of disappointment. "Send her in. And if she can't handle a silent three-year-old, we're done with her in an hour."
"Yes, sir."
The line clicked off. Kairos returned his attention to the file, though the words blurred together into meaningless shapes. Educational psychology degree. Five years of childcare experience. Glowing references. None of it mattered. Leo would take one look at her, turn away, and retreat into that impenetrable silence. Just like all the others.
The door opened.
Time didn't just stop. It shattered.
Kairos's entire world fractured into a thousand jagged pieces, each one reflecting the impossible sight before him. His breath caught—actually caught—somewhere between his lungs and his throat, strangling him with shock and desperate, agonizing hope.
Her.
The woman standing in his doorway wore a simple blue dress, professional and understated, her dark hair pulled back in a neat bun that emphasized the elegant line of her neck. She carried herself with a confidence that was new, a straightness to her spine that hadn't been there before. But everything else—
Everything else was exactly the same.
The curve of her jaw. The slight tilt of her head as she took in the office. The way her fingers wrapped around the strap of her bag, knuckles just barely white with tension. Even the scar he knew was hidden beneath the modest neckline of her dress—a small mark on her left collarbone from a childhood fall she'd told him about once, late at night, when vulnerability had slipped past her careful defenses.
Kairos knew that scar. He'd traced it with his fingers. Kissed it. Memorized it during the months when she'd lived in his home, carrying his child, pretending they were nothing more than a business transaction.
But her eyes—
Her eyes were different. Harder. Sharper. They swept over him with professional assessment, cataloging and dismissing him in the same glance. There was no recognition in those eyes. No softness. No trace of the quiet devotion that had once looked up at him with something dangerously close to love.
"Good morning," she said, and even her voice had changed. Steadier. More assured. She extended her hand across the space between them, bridging the three years and the ocean of secrets with practiced politeness. "I'm Elara Hart. Thank you for considering me for the position."
Hart.
Not Vance. Her maiden name. As if she'd never been his, never carried his name even for the brief, brutal months of their arrangement.
Kairos stared at her extended hand like it was a weapon. His own hands clenched into fists beneath the desk, knuckles going white as he fought the overwhelming urge to reach for her, to grab her, to shake her until she remembered—
Until she remembered what? That he'd paid her two million dollars to carry his child? That he'd let his family terrorize her? That he'd thrown her away the moment she'd served her purpose?
That he'd spent every day since the accident searching for her, drowning in guilt and regret and the desperate, aching need to tell her he was sorry?
His body had gone rigid, every muscle locked in place. He couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Could barely think past the roaring in his ears that screamed impossible, impossible, she's supposed to be dead—
Elara's hand lowered slowly, her professional mask slipping just enough to reveal uncertainty. "Are you alright, Mr. Vance?"
Mr. Vance.
She didn't know him. She truly, genuinely didn't know him.
The realization hit like a physical blow. Three years. She'd been alive for three years—walking, breathing, existing somewhere in the world—and he'd been searching in all the wrong places. Every private investigator, every hospital record, every missing person database in five countries. He'd burned through millions trying to find her, haunted by the image of her broken body in that hospital bed, unconscious and unreachable.
And she'd been here all along. Alive. Whole.
Forgotten.
Kairos's mind raced, calculating options and consequences with the cold precision that had built his empire. She didn't remember. The accident had taken her memories, just as the doctors had warned it might. She didn't remember the contract. Didn't remember the pregnancy. Didn't remember him rejecting her, crushing her, destroying the fragile hope that had bloomed between them.
She didn't remember any of it.
Which meant—
Which meant he could tell her anything. He could rewrite their history. He could claim she was his wife, that their son was born of love instead of transaction, that the three years of her absence had been tragedy instead of consequence.
He could have her back.
The thought was intoxicating. Terrifying. Unconscionable.
He was going to do it anyway.
"Is something wrong with my resume?" Elara asked, and there was an edge to her voice now, self-preservation sharpening her words. She was preparing to leave, to write him off as another eccentric billionaire with boundary issues.
Kairos stood abruptly, his chair scraping against the floor with a harsh sound that made her flinch. He moved around the desk, drawn to her like gravity, like inevitability, closing the distance between them with careful, measured steps.
"How much do you remember," he said, his voice raw and rough with three years of grief, "about your life before... now?"
Elara's eyes widened slightly. "I'm sorry?"
He stepped closer, close enough to see the pulse fluttering at her throat, to catch the faint scent of jasmine that he remembered from late nights and early mornings. Close enough to touch her if he dared. "Your past. Do you remember your past clearly?"
"That's an odd question for an interview." She was backing away now, her professional mask cracking completely. Fear flickered across her face—real, instinctive fear that cut him deeper than any blade.
She was afraid of him. Of course she was. He was a stranger to her, a powerful man invading her space, asking invasive questions. She had no memory of the months she'd spent in his home, no context for the intensity radiating from him in waves.
She should run. She should turn around and walk out of this office and never look back.
Kairos made his decision in the space between one heartbeat and the next. A terrible, selfish, devastating decision that would either save them both or destroy whatever remained of his shredded conscience.
"I'm not interviewing you, Elara," he said quietly, and her name on his tongue tasted like redemption and damnation all at once. "I'm asking if you remember being my wife."
The words hung in the air between them, heavy and impossible.
Elara stared at him like he'd lost his mind. Maybe he had. Maybe the three years of searching, of guilt, of endless, crushing loneliness had finally broken something fundamental inside him.
"I think I should leave—" she started, already turning toward the door.
And then it opened.
A small figure burst into the room, moving with the single-minded determination of a child who'd escaped his nanny's watchful eye. Leo. Three years old, with dark hair that fell across his forehead and eyes that were heartbreakingly, unmistakably hers.
The boy had been silent since the day Elara disappeared. Not a word, not a sound, just an eerie, unnatural quiet that had sent Kairos to a dozen specialists and therapists, all of whom offered the same diagnosis: selective mutism, triggered by maternal abandonment, prognosis uncertain.
Leo stopped just inside the doorway. His small body went completely still, his wide eyes fixed on Elara with an intensity that seemed impossible in someone so young.
For a moment, nothing moved. The entire world held its breath.
And then Leo walked forward. Not ran—walked, with careful, deliberate steps that carried him across the office and directly to Elara. He didn't look at Kairos. Didn't acknowledge his father's presence at all. His entire focus, his entire being, oriented toward the woman who had carried him, birthed him, and then vanished from his life.
Leo reached Elara and stopped. His small hand came up, hesitant, and touched her leg just above the knee.
Then he laid his head against her thigh.
The gesture was so simple, so natural, that it took Kairos's breath away. Leo, who hadn't touched another human being with genuine affection in three years. Leo, who flinched away from nannies and therapists and even his own father sometimes. Leo, who existed in a prison of silence and isolation.
Leo had chosen her.
Elara's hand moved without conscious thought, her fingers sliding into the boy's dark hair with a gentleness that spoke of muscle memory, of a bond that transcended conscious awareness. She was touching him like she'd done it a thousand times before. Like her body remembered what her mind had forgotten.
"Oh," she breathed, the single syllable barely audible.
Kairos watched them—his son and the woman he'd destroyed—and felt something fundamental shift in his chest. Cold calculation transformed into desperate, clawing hope.
This could work. It had to work. Because Leo had just given him the only argument that mattered, the only truth that could possibly justify the lie he was about to tell.
This child needs his mother.
And if Kairos had to become a monster to give his son that gift, if he had to lie and manipulate and deceive to bring this broken family back together, then he would do it. He would do anything.
"Please," Kairos whispered, and the word came out broken, stripped of all the power and control that usually armored him. Just a man on the edge of something he couldn't name, looking at the two people who meant everything and nothing, who were strangers and family all at once. "Stay. Just stay."
Elara looked up from Leo's dark hair, her eyes meeting Kairos's across the space of his office. In her gaze he saw confusion, suspicion, and beneath it all, a flicker of something softer. Something that looked dangerously like hope.
She opened her mouth to respond—to agree, to refuse, to demand explanations he couldn't give without destroying everything.
But before she could speak, Leo's hand tightened in the fabric of her dress.
And the boy who hadn't made a sound in three years whispered a single, devastating word:
"Mama."