PART 1

At 7:30 p.m., I was supposed to propose to Blair Whitmore in front of nearly 150 guests.

At 6:42 p.m., I was locked in the bathroom of a Manhattan restaurant, staring at 4 six-year-old boys who looked like exact copies of me.

They wore navy blue sweaters and were arguing over who had taken the longest to wash his hands.

One of them absentmindedly rubbed the back of his neck with his left hand.

I stopped breathing for a second. I had done exactly the same thing since I was a little boy.

“How old are you?” The tallest one answered without fear. “Six.”

That number landed on me with the full weight of a memory I had spent years trying to bury.

Six years earlier, I had loved Lauren Ferris.

It hadn’t been an elegant affair between two important family names.

Lauren was an interior designer, the daughter of a Charleston antiques restorer, independent, uncomfortably honest, and completely foreign to the power games of the Ashfords, my family.

She was the only woman for whom I had been willing to walk away from the family business empire.

She was also the woman who had disappeared without saying goodbye.

A woman’s voice came from the hallway.

“Mason!