The Forgotten Night
The rain came down in sheets over London, washing the grime from the brick and cobblestone until the city gleamed like a dark jewel. Inside her flat on Mallow Street, Iris Delacroix sat at a scarred wooden table with a magnifying loupe pressed to her right eye, a seventeenth-century oil sketch spread before her beneath the warm halo of a desk lamp.
The call came at half past three.
She let it ring seven times before answering, her fingers still smudged with zinc white and linseed oil. The voice on the other end belonged to a woman named Celeste Thornton, senior partner at Thornton & Hale, Solicitors. The name was familiar in the way a scar is familiar—something you’d rather forget but can’t.
“Miss Delacroix. I represent the Pemberton family. We need you to come in and sign a document. It concerns an evening seven years ago.”
Iris set down her brush. The clock on the mantel ticked.
“I don’t understand.”
“You will when you arrive. Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. I’ll have a car sent.”
The line went dead before Iris could refuse.
She stood there with the receiver in her hand, the rain hammering against the windowpanes, and felt the floor tilt beneath her feet. Seven years. She had built her life around not thinking about that night—and yet Jace slept in the next room with the same dark hair and the same way of frowning in his sleep.
She had never told anyone his name.
Perhaps she had never told herself.
The next morning, the car arrived at ten to nine. Black town car, polished to a mirror shine, a driver in a charcoal suit who did not meet her eyes when he opened the door. Iris wore her best coat—a wool thing she’d found in a charity shop on King’s Road—and carried her handbag like a shield.
The offices of Thornton & Hale occupied the top two floors of a building near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, all mahogany and brass and the kind of silence that cost money. Celeste Thornton was a woman in her fifties with iron-gray hair swept into a knot and reading glasses that hung from a chain of tiny pearls. She did not offer Iris a seat until the door had clicked shut behind them.
“Thank you for coming, Miss Delacroix.”
“You didn’t give me much choice.”
Thornton smiled the way a snake might smile before swallowing a mouse. “Please. Sit.”
The document was already laid out on the conference table—six pages bound in a deep burgundy folder. Iris did not touch it. She counted the number of windows in the room instead. Three. All facing east. The morning light fell in pale rectangles across the polished wood.
“What exactly am I signing?”
“A non-disclosure agreement,” Thornton said, settling into the chair across from her. “It concerns the night of October fourteenth, 2018, when you were in the company of Julian Voss at the Belgrave Hotel in Knightsbridge.”
Iris’s hands went still in her lap.
“I don’t remember what happened that night.”
“That’s precisely the point of the NDA, Miss Delacroix. The Pemberton family would like to ensure that you never remember—publicly, at least. You will agree not to discuss, reference, or otherwise acknowledge any interaction with Mr. Voss during his residence in London seven years ago. In exchange, you will receive a one-time payment of two hundred thousand pounds.”
The figure hung in the air like a bell that had been struck.
Iris looked at the document. Two hundred thousand pounds would pay off her mother’s medical debts. It would buy Jace a proper bed instead of the pull-out cot he was outgrowing. It would mean she could work on commissions she actually chose, instead of scraping by on restoration jobs that paid in exposure and promises.
But there was a weight to the room that had nothing to do with money.
“What if I refuse?”
Thornton’s smile did not waver. “Then your contract with the Dulwich Gallery will be terminated. I believe you’re three weeks into a six-month restoration of their Reubens triptych. The Pembertons sit on the board. They’ve already prepared the paperwork.”
Iris had spent two years trying to land that contract. She had catalogued every crack, every flake of pigment, every brushstroke that had been laid down in 1636. She knew the painting better than she knew her own face.
“You’re destroying my career because I might talk about a night I can’t even remember?”
“We’re not destroying anything,” Thornton said, folding her hands. “We’re offering you a choice. Sign the document, and the contract continues. Walk away, and you walk away from both.”
The ticking of the clock was the only sound in the room. Iris counted its rhythm. Twelve ticks per fifteen seconds. Forty-eight per minute. She could sit here for an hour and count every one, and it would not change the fact that she had no leverage, no power, no army of solicitors to fight on her behalf.
“I won’t sign something that tries to erase my son’s existence,” she said.
Thornton’s expression flickered—the first crack in the mask. “Your son has nothing to do with this.”
“He has everything to do with this. You know it. The Pembertons know it. That’s why you’re here. You’re scared of what Julian Voss might do if he finds out.”
The name hung between them. Julian Voss. The exiled prince of a small Eastern European kingdom—a man she had met exactly once, in a dimly lit hotel bar, seven years ago. She had known him for six hours. She remembered the way he had looked at her across the room, like she was the only solid thing in a world that kept shifting. She remembered the warmth of his hand on the small of her back.
She remembered nothing after one in the morning.
The tabloids had filled in the blanks. Julian Voss had been in London for a year, exiled after a coup attempt led by the Pemberton family—industrialists who wanted to turn his country into a private playground. He had fled back to reclaim his throne, and by the time Iris had woken up in a hotel room with no memory of the night before, he was already gone.
She had not known she was pregnant until three months later.
And she had never, not once, tried to find him.
“Miss Delacroix.” Thornton’s voice had lost its pleasant veneer. “I strongly advise you to sign the document.”
“No.”
The word came out clean and sharp, like a blade drawn from its sheath.
Thornton stared at her for a long moment. Then she reached into her briefcase and withdrew a single sheet of paper. “Your contract with the Dulwich Gallery is terminated, effective immediately. Security will escort you out.”
Iris did not wait for the escort. She stood, gathered her handbag, and walked to the door with her spine straight and her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her throat. She made it to the lift before her hands began to shake.
She was thirty-one years old, she had a seven-year-old son, and she had just thrown away the only steady income she had.
The rain had stopped by the time she reached Mallow Street. The sky had cleared to a pale, watery blue, and the cobblestones glistened like river stones. She climbed the three flights of stairs to her flat and stood in the doorway, listening to the silence.
Jace was at school. He would be home in three hours.
She walked to the window and looked down at the street. A black town car was parked at the corner. The driver sat motionless behind the wheel, staring straight ahead.
They were watching her.
She pulled the curtain closed and sat down at the table where her brushes and tubes of pigment waited. The Reubens triptych was gone now. She would have to pack up her tools, call the gallery, arrange for the painting to be collected. The thought of it made her chest feel hollow.
But underneath the hollow was something else. Something hard and bright and defiant.
She had kept Jace a secret for seven years. She had kept him safe from the Pembertons, from the politics, from the weight of a father he had never met. And she had done it alone.
She was still doing it alone.
The clock on the mantel struck four. The sound of footsteps on the stairs—light, quick, familiar—broke through her spiral. She stood, smoothed her dress, and went to the door.
Jace burst through it with his schoolbag half-open and his tie twisted sideways. He had her dark hair and Julian’s eyes—a shade of cobalt so striking that strangers stopped to stare. He was small for his age, with a thoughtful frown that made him look older than seven.
“Mama, Mrs. Hartley said we’re doing the Christmas pageant and I might get to be a shepherd, but Thomas Whitmore wants to be the lead shepherd and he said I’m too short, but Mrs. Hartley said height doesn’t matter, it’s about—”
“Slow down.” Iris knelt and straightened his tie. “Start again.”
He did, his hands moving as he talked, his words tumbling over each other in a rush of excitement and indignation. She nodded and smiled and made the right sounds, but her mind was still in that conference room, still counting the windows, still feeling the weight of the document she had refused.
Jace stopped mid-sentence.
“Mama? You’re not listening.”
She looked at him—really looked, for the first time since she had walked through the door. His dark hair was falling into his eyes. He had a scrape on his chin from the playground. He was wearing the jumper his grandmother had knitted him, two sizes too big, the sleeves rolled up in thick, clumsy folds.
He was perfect.
And he had never asked about his father.
Not once. Not in seven years.
She had told herself it was because he was too young, because he didn’t need to know, because the truth was too tangled and dangerous to explain. But the truth was simpler than that.
She had been afraid.
Afraid that if she said Julian’s name out loud, the Pembertons would find out. Afraid that if she told Jace the truth, he would want to find his father—and she would have to explain why his father wasn’t here. Afraid that the fragile life she had built would shatter like a glass dropped on stone.
But she had just refused to sign away her son’s existence.
And she was tired of being afraid.
“Jace,” she said, her voice steady. “Sit down. I need to tell you something.”
He dropped his schoolbag and sat on the edge of the pull-out cot, his legs swinging. She pulled up a chair across from him, close enough to touch his knee.
“Do you ever wonder about your father?”
The question hung in the air. Jace’s swinging legs stopped.
“Sometimes,” he said, very quietly. “Kael at school says I don’t have one. I told him I do, I just haven’t met him yet.”
Iris’s throat tightened. “You do have one. And I should have told you about him a long time ago. His name is Julian Voss. He’s not from England. He’s from a place called Eldoria, very far away. And he doesn’t know about you.”
Jace’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”
“Because I never told him.” The words hurt more than she expected. “I didn’t know how. And I was scared. But that’s not your fault. It was never your fault.”
He was quiet for a long moment, processing the information the way he processed everything—slowly, carefully, turning it over in his mind like a puzzle piece that didn’t quite fit.
“Do you think he’d want to know me?”
“I think,” she said, “that if he knew about you, he would want to know you very much.”
Jace looked down at his hands. His fingers were stained with ink from the school pen. He had a habit of chewing on the caps when he was thinking.
“Can we find him?”
The question hit her like a physical blow. She had spent seven years running away from this moment, and now it was here, sitting cross-legged on a pull-out cot, looking up at her with trust in his eyes.
“I don’t know if we can,” she said honestly. “But I promise you this: I will never lie to you about him again. And if there’s a way—any way—I will find it.”
Jace nodded slowly. Then he slid off the cot and crawled into her lap, his small body warm and solid against hers.
“Mama?”
“Yes, love?”
He looked up at her with Julian’s exact cobalt eyes and whispered, “Mama, is my papa a ghost?”