“Still warm,” he murmured.

He turned his gaze back to me, his blue eyes sharp and unreadable.

“You didn’t answer my calls,” he said.

“My phone was on silent,” I lied. “I was busy.”

“Busy doing what, exactly?”

He took off his coat and hung it on the wooden peg by the door.

Every movement was practiced, slow, and neat.

I looked at him, and for the first time, I didn’t see my husband.

I saw the man who had engineered our adoption of Claire from the very beginning.

I remembered the night he came home twenty years ago, holding a brochure for a private adoption agency.

He had been so warm, so comforting, holding me while I wept over our third failed IVF cycle.

*“I found a way, Evie,”* he had whispered into my hair. *“A young girl who can’t keep her baby. It’s a closed adoption. Perfect for us.”*

It hadn’t been a miracle.

It had been a calculated extraction.

He had gotten his mistress pregnant, threatened her family’s livelihood, and then brought his biological child into my arms to raise.