“That’s a different conversation, and it’s not mine to control. It’s theirs.
Sophie and Leo have a mother who’s told them the truth and will keep telling them the truth. When they’re old enough to want a relationship with you — if they want one — I won’t stand in the way. I’m not you. I don’t punish children for adults’ failures.
But you don’t get to walk in and be their father because it’s convenient now that I’m not useless anymore.
You’ll have to earn them.
The way you never bothered to earn me.”
PART 5 — FINAL
Two years have passed.
Ashcombe Holdings — I renamed it, actually, to Rosalind Vance Capital, my maiden name, because I was done building things under his — is thriving.
It turns out the company was never Desmond’s genius. It was mine, poured into a vessel with his name on it. Given my own name, it grew faster than it ever had.
I kept every employee. They’d been living under Desmond’s chaos for years; under actual management, the place transformed. Two of them cried when I told them the layoffs Desmond had been planning were canceled.
I don’t run it to spite him. I run it because I’m good at it, and because for six years I did this work and let someone else take the credit, and I was done doing that for anyone.
Desmond took his buyout and started another company.
It’s struggling. I hear about it, the way you hear about weather in a place you used to live. He doesn’t have the thing that made the first one work, because the thing that made the first one work was me, and he finally, too late, understands that.
He’s tried to reach the children twice.
The first time, he sent gifts — expensive ones, the kind you buy to impress, not to connect. I let the twins open them. Leo liked the toy. Sophie asked why a stranger was sending her things.
The second time, he asked to meet them. I said yes — supervised, careful, on their terms. He came. He was awkward and trying, and I watched a man who’d never had to earn anything in his life attempt, clumsily, to earn two four-year-olds.
I don’t know if he’ll manage it.
