Chapter 1 — Four Children With His Eyes

Alex Vance dropped his smartphone onto the hardwood floor when the television camera pulled back and revealed four young children sitting on a bright rug around his ex-wife.

He had come home early from a client meeting to his penthouse in downtown Boston, and he had turned on the television for background noise, the way he did most evenings in the too-quiet apartment.

And there, on a national morning show, was Elena Rivas, being interviewed about Little Nests, the childcare and early-education franchise she had built, he was learning in real time, entirely from the ground up.

It had been nearly six years since he had last seen her.

Her dark hair was shorter now, her voice firmer, and she carried a quiet, grounded confidence that he did not remember from their marriage, the confidence of a woman who had been through something and come out the other side of it as herself.

And then the camera shifted to the children.

Two little girls and two little boys.

One of the boys tilted his chin up, and Alex froze, because that distinct deep dimple on the boy’s right cheek was identical to his own.

One of the little girls turned toward her mother, and Alex recognized the exact hazel shape of the eyes he looked at every morning in the mirror.

“They just turned five, didn’t they?” the host asked warmly.

“Five years and two months,” Elena said, with a soft smile.

And Alex, sitting alone on his expensive sofa, did the arithmetic without meaning to, the way a drowning man reaches for anything.

They had separated five years and eleven months ago.

He sat very still, staring at four thriving five-year-olds, and understood that the ground of his entire life had just shifted beneath him.

The arithmetic, once he had done it, was the cruelest kind, because it did not only tell him that the children were almost certainly his.

It told him, in the same instant, the precise dimensions of what he had lost.

Five years and two months old.