“I know.”
“Maybe we can be friends.”
Lyra felt the floor move beneath her.
Cassian’s gaze found hers, and she saw it then. Not suspicion. Not yet. Something worse.
Recognition.
That evening, Cassian returned home against medical advice because he had built an empire by treating advice as a decorative object.
The Vale house sat above the bay, all stone, glass, and controlled beauty. Seraphina Vale was waiting in the drawing room with a crystal glass untouched beside her. She wore cream silk and diamonds small enough to suggest taste rather than hunger. Her blond hair was smooth. Her posture was perfect.
She had always been perfect.
That was what had frightened Cassian most about her.
“You should be in the hospital,” she said.
“I met the child who saved me.”
Seraphina’s eyes did not move.
“How sweet.”
“Her name is Juno Hart.”
A tiny silence entered the room.
Cassian heard it.
He had spent years negotiating with men who lied for sport. He knew the sound of a truth being buried.
“Her mother is Lyra.”
Seraphina lifted the glass, then seemed to remember she had not drunk from it.
“I see.”
Cassian watched her fingers.
“She looks like Maren.”
“Children look alike at that age.”
“No.”
Seraphina’s mouth hardened.
“You nearly died three days ago. You are emotional.”
“I am many things. Emotional is not usually one of them.”
“That is debatable.”
“I want a DNA test.”
The glass struck the table too sharply.
“For what possible reason?”
“Because I looked at that child and saw my daughter.”
“You have a daughter.”
“I may have two.”
Seraphina stood.
“This is obscene.”
“What is?”
“Dragging some woman from your past into our family because you had a medical scare and saw ghosts.”
Cassian rose slowly. Pain crossed his face, but he remained standing.
“I saw fear in your face when I said Lyra’s name.”
“You saw anger.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I know the difference.”
The next day, Cassian called Lyra.
She nearly did not answer.
When she did, neither of them wasted time pretending.
“Was Juno born in March?” he asked.
Lyra sat down on the edge of her bed.
“How do you know that?”
“Was she born at St. Aurelia Hospital?”
Her silence was answer enough.
Cassian closed his eyes.
“Lyra, I need to ask you something, and I need you to understand I would not ask if it didn’t matter.”
“What?”
“Was there another baby?”
The room disappeared.
Lyra was back under white lights, exhausted, terrified, hearing a doctor say words that no mother should hear while her body still searched for two cries.
One survived.
One did not.
A daughter placed in her arms.
Another taken away before she could say goodbye.
She had mourned a child whose face she had never touched.
“Lyra?”
Her voice came out small.
“They told me Juno’s twin died.”
Cassian did not speak.
Lyra gripped the phone.
“Cassian, why are you asking me this?”
“Because Seraphina and I have a daughter named Maren. She is seven. She was brought home from St. Aurelia two days after Juno was born.”
Lyra stopped breathing.
“No.”
“I don’t know the truth yet.”
“No.”
“But I think someone does.”
The DNA test took four days.
To Lyra, it felt like four years.
She moved through them like a woman underwater. She packed Juno’s lunches. She answered client emails at the small design firm where she worked. She read bedtime stories and forgot every word. She watched her daughter sleep and tried not to imagine another child somewhere in the city with the same face, the same hands, the same laugh waiting in a life built from theft.
Cassian waited differently.
He hired investigators. He obtained sealed hospital records through legal channels that bent under the weight of his name. He spoke to doctors who suddenly remembered nothing. He found a retired night nurse in a coastal town who hung up the moment he said St. Aurelia.
Then the report arrived.
Cassian and Lyra opened it together in his attorney’s office.
Neither sat down.
The attorney read the conclusion aloud, though the words were already there in black ink.
Juniper Hart and Maren Vale were monozygotic twins.
Identical.
The same mother.
The same father.
Separated at birth.
Lyra made no sound. She simply folded forward as if a cord had been cut inside her.
Cassian caught her before she hit the floor.
For a moment she let him hold her. Not because she forgave him. Not because the past had healed. But because grief had weight, and his arms were the nearest place that did not feel like falling.
“She was alive,” Lyra whispered.
Cassian’s face changed in a way no boardroom opponent had ever seen.
“Yes.”
“They told me she died.”
“I know.”
“My baby was alive.”
“I know.”
Lyra pulled away from him, shaking.
“Do not say you know. You do not know what that sentence did to me.”