No boys.
No apron.
She wore a dark coat and carried a battered canvas bag against her side like armor.
Grant stood when she approached.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Don’t make this sound like a business meeting.”
He sat again.
“I found a courier receipt.”
Mara froze.
“What receipt?”
“You sent me a package six years ago.
My mother’s office intercepted it.”
Mara’s jaw tightened.
“So you finally know I tried.”
The sentence punched through him.
“What was inside?”
She looked toward the window.
For several seconds she said nothing.
Then she opened the canvas bag.
She removed a thin folder, worn soft at the corners from being carried too long.
Grant felt his pulse in his throat.
Mara laid four copies of birth records on the table.
Then a faded clinic appointment card.
Then a photograph from an early ultrasound.
She kept one hand resting over the papers.
“I found out I was pregnant a few weeks after you left for London,” she said.
Grant remembered the trip.
His father had been ill.
A family acquisition was collapsing.
His mother had insisted Grant remain abroad longer than planned.
“I called you.
Your number had changed.
I emailed.
Nothing.
Finally, I went to your family’s house.”
Grant already knew where the story was going.
He still asked.
“Who met you?”
“Your mother.”
Mara’s voice remained steady, but her thumb pressed hard into the edge of the folder.
“I told her I was pregnant.
At that point, I didn’t know there were four.
I thought there was one baby.
She told me you knew.”
Grant stopped breathing.
“She said what?”
“She told me you’d asked her to handle it because you didn’t want a scandal.
She said your family was under financial pressure, your father was sick, and you had chosen your responsibilities.”
“I never said that.”
“I know that now.”
“Mara, I never even knew—”
“I know.”
Her voice cracked for the first time.
She looked down until she had control again.
“But I didn’t know then.”
His anger wanted movement.
