“Odette has already given birth to my son.

He’s fifteen months old now.”

The room kept moving around me — voices, alarms, the midwife’s hands — but all of it had gone strangely far away, as though I were hearing it from underwater.

“The Pembroke line requires a male heir to carry the foundation,” Roderick went on, glancing at my heart monitor with the detachment of a man reading a stock ticker.

“Little Nash has already been entered into the Pembroke Living Trust and registered with the family bank.