I should explain about Damon Hale.

Five years ago I was twenty-seven, finishing my master's in early childhood education, and working part-time at a tutoring center in Midtown to pay the gap between my stipend and my rent. He was thirty-two, running the company his father had founded, and in the tutoring center because his younger brother needed help with the SAT.

I was the tutor.

He was the older brother who came to the third session to check on the progress.

I remember thinking: this is someone who shows up for the people he's responsible for.

I remember also thinking: this is someone who has been responsible for people since he was old enough to understand what responsibility was, and who is a little tired of it.

We talked for twenty minutes after the session while his brother was in the bathroom.

He came back the next week.

And the week after.

The brother passed the SAT. The sessions ended. Damon Hale asked if I wanted to have coffee.

I want to be clear: I knew what I was doing. He was from a different world — Hale Industries, the family name on two buildings in the financial district, the kind of wealth that had been accumulated over generations. I was a grad student with student loans and a futon.

But he was also funny in a dry, restrained way that I found irresistible. And he asked questions that assumed I had things worth saying. And when I talked about the kindergartners I was doing my practicum with, he listened the way people listen when they find something genuinely interesting.

Four months.

Secret, mostly, because there was always a reason it wasn't the right time to be public. His family had expectations. His mother was in the early stages of planning an engagement that had been discussed since he was a teenager — a family alliance, the Hale family and the Park family, Damon and Celeste Park. Nothing had been formalized yet. But it was on the horizon.

I knew about it.

I told myself it was fine, that we were what we were and the future would be what it would be.

And then I found out I was pregnant.

I didn't tell him immediately. I needed a week to understand what I thought, what I wanted, what the situation actually was. That was my week — not deception, not strategy, just the seven days of trying to understand a fact that had rearranged everything.

On the eighth day I sent him a message. Long, honest, everything.

He didn't respond.

I waited a week. Two.

Nothing.

I understood: he'd made his choice. The family arrangement was proceeding. The message had arrived at an inconvenient time and he had decided.

I left the tutoring center. I finished my degree. I moved to the apartment where the twins would be born. I built what I built.

I'd spent five years understanding that people make choices that don't include you, and that life goes on, and that four years of Mia and Noah was worth everything that had preceded them.

I had made peace with it.

Mostly.

The man in the suit at the end of the path had the same jaw as Noah.

I was going to need to make peace with something new.