Chapter 322: Old Threads
Yvette had spent the morning calling.
She’d called Julian’s office twice and been put through to a polite assistant both times, who promised to relay the message. She’d called a number she still had from Kalian, an old contact from years back, hoping he might at least agree to see her face-to-face, hear her out, let her say the things she’d practiced saying for three years.
He’d refused.
Plainly, without much explanation. Not interested in opening that door again, the message back had said, relayed through someone else, not even him directly.
She’d stood in the prison’s visitor parking lot afterward, phone still warm in her hand, feeling the old fury try to rise in her and finding, to her own surprise, that it didn’t rise as high as it used to.
Three years of therapy had filed something down in her. Not the wanting. Just the speed at which it used to take over.
She was still standing there, deciding what to do with the rest of her morning, when she saw the woman walking toward the visitor entrance.
She did a double-take.
The same face. The same precise, composed walk. The same and then, no. Not the same. Different hair. A heaviness in the shoulders that Amara never carried.
Yvette laughed before she could stop herself. "What are you doing here?" she said, falling into step a few feet from her.
The woman turned, frowning slightly, genuinely puzzled. "I’m sorry, do I know you?"
Yvette scoffed, arms crossing. "So now you don’t know me. Interesting, Mrs. Amara Vale, high and mighty on your horse."
"I’m sorry," the woman said again, something careful entering her voice now. "I’m Amira. Her sister."
Yvette’s eyebrows went up. "For real? She has a twin?" She studied her really studied her now, the small differences becoming visible the longer she looked.
"Huh. Well. You look nervous. Who are you visiting?"
"My husband," Amira said. "Well, ex-husband. Leo Vance. I came to bury the past."
Something shifted across Yvette’s face recognition, sharp and sudden, followed by something closer to delight.
"So you’re the wife of Leo Vance," she said slowly. "I see." A small, knowing smile. "Well. I’m Yvette Alcantara, and it turns out I know your husband quite well." She tilted her head. "Maybe we should see him together."
Amira hesitated only a second. "Okay."
Leo came out into the visitation room and saw the two of them seated side by side, and something moved across his face immediately, but it wasn’t Yvette he was looking at.
"Amira." He sat down across from her, leaning forward, already talking before she’d said a word. "You came. Let me explain, you didn’t give me a chance after the hearing, you walked out before I could even.."
"It doesn’t matter," Amira said, cutting through it gently but firmly. "You don’t have to explain anything. I only came to see you and tell you that I forgive you. For everything. For my mother. For the company. For playing with my feelings, all of it." She held his gaze, steady.
"I was a bad person, too, Leo. Maybe this was my karma. That’s why I came."
Beside her, Yvette let out a low whistle. "So he played you, too. Wow, Leo. You really are something."
"Shut up, Yvette," Leo snapped, not even glancing at her. "No one’s talking to you."
Amira looked between them, the tension in the small room suddenly sharper than it had any reason to be sharper than two strangers meeting in a prison waiting room should produce.
"Wait," she said slowly. "How do you two know each other?"
Neither of them answered right away.
Yvette leaned back in her chair, arms folded, and let it out the way a person lets out something they’ve been carrying so long it’s become part of their posture.
"Well, I’ll tell you," she said. "Leo here was my boyfriend. Was. He stayed with me the whole time he was married to you." She watched Amira’s face as she said it, not unkindly, almost like she was sorry for the impact even as she delivered it.
"He didn’t just lie to you. He cheated. And here’s the part you’re really going to enjoy, he’s the father of my three children."
"Triplets," she said, when Amira didn’t speak. "I had triplets. And because of him, one of my babies is missing. My little girl. Lucia. Taken from the hospital the day she was born." Her voice cracked once, hard, before she steadied it. "And her father doesn’t even care."
"Wow." Amira’s voice came out faint. She looked at Leo. "Leo."
"I had broken up with her by the time you and I got together, Amira, I swear to you." Leo leaned forward, hands gripping the edge of the table between them. "I never cheated on you. Never. You have to believe me."
"Yeah," Yvette said, dry. "That’s exactly what you’d say." She looked at Amira directly now. "I did some investigating of my own. Sebastian Creed and Kalian Vale, your sister’s family, are connected somehow. And one of them knows what happened to my daughter. Kalian won’t tell me anything. I tried reaching this Sebastian, but all he’d say was that Kalian planned the whole thing. Planned to hand my baby off to someone, so Amara would spend years chasing the wrong child instead of finding her very own."
The room went very still.
"I’m going to find that person," Yvette said. "And I am going to make every single one of you pay for it."
Amira didn’t move.
It wasn’t Yvette’s anger landing on her that had stopped her breath. It was something quieter and far worse, arriving in pieces, fitting itself together with a horrible, mechanical precision behind her eyes.
Someone planned to give the baby to someone.
So Amara would be chasing the wrong child.
She thought of Hope. Asleep right now under anesthesia two floors above a sterile table, a small fist curled the way it always curled, oblivious.
She thought of how she found her in a hallway. She thought of every quiet, lucky, miraculous thing that had happened to put that child into her arms exactly when her arms had been most empty.
It hadn’t been luck.
It hadn’t been a miracle.