Pieces of a Broken Past
The travel from The Bramble & Bean Bookstore Café, downtown Hemlock Grove to Winslow & Sterling Executive Suite, 30th floor consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The elevator doors slid open onto the thirtieth floor, and Iris stepped into a world of glass and steel that felt deliberately inhospitable. The reception area of Winslow & Sterling stretched before her in shades of charcoal and chrome, every surface polished to a mirror finish that reflected her own hesitation back at her. A massive abstract painting dominated the far wall—splashes of deep crimson against black—and she wondered if that was meant to intimidate visitors or if it was simply Victor Sterling’s idea of taste.
She had not been inside this building in four years. Not since the night Cole Sterling had summoned her to his office and explained, with the calm precision of a man accustomed to having his orders obeyed, exactly what would happen if she ever contacted Rowan again.
The memory made her stomach clench.
“Ms. Harrington?” The receptionist’s voice cut through the hum of climate control. “Mr. Winslow is expecting you. I’ll take you to his office.”
Iris followed the woman down a corridor lined with conference rooms, their glass walls revealing men in tailored suits and women with sharp haircuts hunched over laptops and documents. None of them looked up. None of them needed to. She was already marked—the woman who had slipped past their defenses once and was foolish enough to do it again.
The receptionist stopped at a corner office and knocked once.
“Come in.”
His voice. Even through the heavy door, that voice did something to her chest that she had spent four years trying to forget.
The receptionist pushed the door open and gestured for Iris to enter. “Mr. Winslow, your guest has arrived.”
Iris stepped inside, and the door clicked shut behind her, sealing them in.
Rowan stood behind his desk, hands flat against the polished surface, his body taut as a drawn bowstring. The office was enormous—floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls offering a panoramic view of the city skyline, the afternoon sun catching the edges of silver-framed photographs on his shelves, a leather couch that looked more decorative than functional. Everything about the space was designed to project control, from the geometric precision of the furniture arrangement to the careful curation of awards and certifications that lined the walls.
And yet, standing there, Rowan looked like a man who had lost his grip on absolutely everything.
“You came,” he said, and there was something in his voice that sounded almost like surprise.
“You didn’t give me much of a choice.” Iris stayed near the door, her purse strap cutting into her shoulder, her keys pressed against her palm inside her jacket pocket. The feel of them grounded her—a reminder that she could leave. That she had a car downstairs, a son waiting at Margot’s apartment, a life that she had built with blood and bone and desperate love.
“No,” he agreed, and something shifted in his expression. “No, I suppose I didn’t.”
He straightened, and she watched him move around the desk, watched the way his shoulders filled the space, the way his presence seemed to dim the sunlight streaming through the windows. He was older now. The boyish edges she remembered had sharpened into something harder, more defined. His jaw was cut from granite, his eyes the same shade of gold-flecked amber that she saw every morning across her breakfast table.
His son’s eyes.
“I need to know,” Rowan said, stopping five feet away, his hands dropping to his sides. “I need you to tell me everything.”
Iris forced herself to breathe. She had rehearsed this conversation a dozen times in the car on the way here, had practiced the words until they felt like armor. But now, standing in front of him, all of those carefully constructed sentences scattered like ash in a wind.
“Four years ago,” she started, and her voice came out steadier than she expected, “I was finishing my master’s thesis at Westbrook University. You were there for some kind of corporate partnership meeting. We met at the coffee shop on campus.”
Rowan’s jaw worked. “I remember.”
“We spent three weeks together.” The memories surfaced, unbidden—late nights in his hotel room, tangled in sheets that smelled of him, laughing at nothing because everything felt like joy. “You told me your name was Rowan. You never mentioned the Sterling family. You never mentioned that your father ran one of the most powerful corporations in the city.”
“I was trying to escape him.” Rowan’s voice cracked. “I was trying to be someone else for just a few weeks.”
“Well, it worked.” Iris pulled her keys from her pocket, wrapped her fingers around them until the metal bit into her skin. “Because when Cole Sterling called me into his office after you left, I had no idea who he was. I thought it was a mistake. I thought he had the wrong woman.”
Rowan flinched.
“He knew everything,” she continued, the words pouring out now, unstoppable as a flood. “He knew what classes I was taking. He knew where I grew up. He knew my mother’s maiden name. And he told me—in that calm, reasonable voice of his—that if I ever contacted you again, he would make sure I never finished my degree. That he would make sure my mother lost her nursing license. That he would make sure I understood exactly what it meant to cross the Sterling family.”
“I never knew.” Rowan’s hands were shaking. “I never—Iris, I didn’t know he did that.”
“Of course you didn’t. That’s how he works.” She took a step closer, and she saw him tense, saw the wild hope flicker in his eyes. “And when I found out I was pregnant, two weeks after you went back to your corner office, I knew exactly what he would do to me. To the baby. So I left. I transferred schools. I changed my name back to Harrington. I found a apartment in a part of the city that doesn’t exist on Sterling maps.”
Rowan stared at her, and she watched the realization hit him like a physical blow. “You did all of that alone.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“You could have told me.” His voice was rough, raw. “You could have found a way.”
“How?” The word came out sharp, biting. “You were thirty floors above me in this building, surrounded by Sterling security, Sterling lawyers, Sterling everything. Your brother Victor practically ran your schedule. Do you think he would have let a message from me reach you? Do you think Cole Sterling would have allowed his heir to walk away from the family legacy for a pregnant graduate student and a child he never wanted?”
Rowan’s hands fisted at his sides. “What do you know about what my father wanted?”
“I know he threatened to destroy my entire existence if I so much as breathed your name.” Iris’s voice dropped. “I know he looked at me like I was nothing—like I was a problem to be solved. And I know that when I look at Toby, I see the same eyes that looked at me in that office. And I have spent every single day since he was born terrified that Cole Sterling would find out he exists.”
The silence that followed was heavy, thick as water.
Rowan turned away from her, walked to the window, and pressed his palm flat against the glass. The city sprawled below them, indifferent and vast.
“Toby,” he said, and the name sounded sacred in his mouth. “You named him Toby.”
“Tobias, actually. After my grandfather.” Iris’s throat tightened. “But we call him Toby.”
“He’s seven years old.”
“Yes.”
“Seven years,” Rowan repeated, and his reflection in the glass shifted as he closed his eyes. “I missed seven years.”
Iris said nothing. There were no words for that. No apology she could offer, no explanation that would soften the blow. She had made the choice she had to make, and she would make it again a thousand times, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t feel the weight of what she had taken from him.
When Rowan turned back, his expression had hardened. The wild hope was gone, replaced by something colder, more calculated.
“You need to tell me everything,” he said. “Everything you know about my father’s movements. Everything you’ve seen, anyone you’ve noticed following you. I need to know how much danger you and Toby are in.”
Iris’s breath caught. “What do you mean, how much danger?”
Rowan crossed to his desk, pulled open a drawer, and extracted a leather-bound folder. He held it out to her, and she took it with trembling hands.
“I’ve been building a case against my father for three years,” he said. “Financial fraud. Market manipulation. A dozen other charges I can prove if I can get the right documents in front of the right people. But two weeks ago, my brother Victor started asking questions about my personal life. About where I went when I disappeared for those three weeks four years ago. About whether I had any secrets worth finding.”
Iris opened the folder, and her blood turned to ice.
The pages were filled with photographs. Photographs of her campus apartment, the one she had moved out of years ago. Photographs of grocery stores she had shopped at, coffee shops she had visited. And then, at the back—
A photograph of the elementary school three blocks from her new apartment. The one Toby attended.
“Victor tracked your university accounts,” Rowan said, and his voice was flat, controlled—the voice of a man who had already processed his horror and moved on to action. “He found the withdrawal records. The transfer applications. We’ve been watching each other’s financial movements for years, and he noticed the anomaly. He found the new identity you built. He knows you’re in the city.”
Iris felt the folder slip from her fingers. It hit the carpet with a soft thud.
“How long?” she whispered. “How long has he known?”
“I’m not sure.” Rowan’s face was pale. “But I know he’s been tracking your movements for at least a month. He’s been waiting. Watching. Trying to figure out what made you worth hiding from the family.”
“He doesn’t know about Toby.”
It wasn’t a question, but Rowan answered anyway. “If he did, my father would have already moved. Victor would have already used it as leverage. They’re still gathering information, trying to understand what connection you have to me that would make you worth protecting.”
Iris’s knees buckled, and she sank into the leather chair behind her. The office was suddenly too small, too full of light, too exposed. She could feel the weight of the city pressing in around her, could feel the eyes of a hundred Sterling employees on the floors below, could feel Victor Sterling’s gaze sweeping across the city like a searchlight, hunting for her son.
“I need your help,” she said, and the words tasted like surrender.
Rowan dropped to his knees in front of her, and she saw the desperation in his eyes, the hunger for connection that she had tried so hard to forget.
“You have it,” he said. “You have all of it. Everything I am, everything I have, everything I can build—it’s yours. It’s Toby’s. I will tear this city apart before I let my father touch a single hair on his head.”
Iris looked at him, at the fierce devotion burning in those familiar eyes, and she wanted to believe him. She wanted to fall into the safety he was offering, to let someone else carry the weight for once.
But she had learned, four years ago, that safety was an illusion. And she had learned, in the seven years since, that the only person she could truly trust was herself.
“We need a plan,” she said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. “We need to know what Victor knows, and we need a way to protect Toby that doesn’t depend on hope or luck or promises.”
Rowan nodded, and she saw something shift in his expression—a recognition, maybe, of the woman she had become in his absence. Not the grad student who had fallen into his bed, starry-eyed and naive. But a mother. A survivor. A woman who had learned to fight with silence and shadows because she had no other weapons.
“I have documents,” he said, rising and moving back to his desk. “Financial records that show my father’s shell companies. Transaction logs that trace the money he’s been hiding for years. If Victor moves against us, I can use them to destabilize the entire family structure.”
Iris stood, her legs steadier now. “And if he moves before you can?”
Rowan’s fingers stilled over his keyboard. “Then we run. I have a safe house in the northern territories—off the grid, no paper trail, owned by a shell corporation that even Victor doesn’t know about. I built it three years ago, when I started planning to take my father down. I never thought I’d need it to protect a family.”
The word hung between them, delicate and dangerous.
Family.
Iris opened her mouth to respond, but before she could speak, a sharp buzz cut through the air.
Rowan’s phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen and paled. “Victor knows about Toby. He just sent me a photo of your apartment building.”