For a few seconds, you forget how to breathe.
Adrian Vale is standing in front of you, holding your hand like it is something fragile he thought he had lost forever. The ballroom is silent around you, every polished executive and diamond-covered guest suddenly frozen in place. Behind him, Caleb’s shattered glass spreads across the marble floor like a warning.
“I’ve been searching for you for thirty years,” Adrian says again, his voice low and shaken. “I still love you.”
You stare at him, at the silver in his hair, at the lines around his eyes, at the expression of a man who has carried one question for half his life.
And then you know.
Not his name.
Not yet.
But the eyes.
Those gray-blue eyes that once belonged to a teenage boy standing in the rain outside a bus station in Portland, Oregon, holding your hand and promising he would come back for you.
“Adrian?” you whisper.
His face breaks.
Behind you, Caleb finally finds his voice. “Excuse me?”
No one answers him.
Adrian is still looking only at you, and suddenly the ballroom disappears. You are seventeen again, wearing a thrift-store sweater, your hair soaked from the rain, clutching a letter you never got to send. Back then, he was not Adrian Vale, billionaire investor and owner of half the companies Caleb worshipped. He was Adrian Vance, a foster kid with bruised knuckles, brilliant eyes, and a dream too big for the town that tried to swallow him.
