When Rosalie and I had first separated, my mother — an ambitious, controlling woman who had never once hidden her contempt for my wife’s ordinary, unmoneyed background — had quietly taken over the management of my schedule and my communications, all of it framed as protecting my focus during the biggest expansion in the company’s history.

I had let her.

I had been grieving and working eighteen-hour days and grateful, God help me, to have one less thing to manage.

And she had used that access to reach into my phone and erase my wife.

Every call.

Every message.

She had paid some faceless offshore assistant to send Rosalie that cold legal text, engineering it so that the woman carrying my child would believe, beyond any doubt, that I had thrown her away.

She had built a wall between me and my own son and mortared it with my own grief, and she had done it, I understood now, so that nothing — not Rosalie, not a baby, not the small stubborn possibility that I might choose love over the next tower — would slow the machine down.