Now, the past had caught up with us at 30,000 feet, and the bill had come due.
"Don't, Blake," I said, my voice cutting through the ambient noise of O'Hare International Airport with a calm, freezing precision that surprised even myself. I bent down, smoothing down Leo's wind-blown curls and checking Toby’s loose shoelace. "Don't pretend you have the right to say their names."
"They're..." Blake took another staggering step forward, ignoring the sleek black Bentley idling behind him, ignoring his personal assistant who was frantically waving a clipboard near the driver's side door. "They're mine. Emma, they look exactly like..." He couldn't finish the sentence. The math was flashing behind his eyes with terrifying clarity. Five years since our bitter divorce. Three identical boys who looked like they had been chiseled from his own childhood photographs.
"Oh, you're a fast learner for a billionaire," I replied, straightening up and pulling my boys closer into a protective circle. "Took you all of five seconds to count backward, didn't it? Five years ago, when you threw me out of our penthouse because you found messages on my phone that didn't fit your pristine corporate narrative, did you ever stop for even one second to ask for the truth?"
"The messages..." Blake stammered, his fingers trembling as he reached out instinctively toward Julian, only to freeze when Julian hid behind my knees. "The texts from Thomas Vance... he said you were meeting him in secret, that you were planning to sell the clean-energy patents to our biggest competitor behind my back! I saw the logs, Emma! I saw the financial transfers!"
"And you believed a piece of corporate spyware planted by your own chief operating officer because it was easier than believing your wife loved you for something other than your net worth," I snapped, my eyes flashing with years of accumulated fury. "Thomas Vance wasn't my lover, Blake. He was the blackmailer who had discovered that your company—your precious Harrington Green Energy—was illegally dumping chemical waste into the Hudson River estuary. I was meeting him in secret to get the hard drives, to protect you, to stop you from going to federal prison for corporate manslaughter! But you didn't want to hear about environmental violations. You wanted a scandal that gave you an excuse to discard me cleanly before the annual shareholder audit."