“I know.”
Maya shifted. “Sylvie didn’t want to tell you without proof.”
“I had proof,” Sylvie said. “Then the drive disappeared.”
“The drive?” I asked.
“The original backup. The one I made before my access changed.”
“Where was it?”
“In my apartment.” Her mouth tightened. “Someone broke in three days before the preliminary hearing. Nothing obvious taken. Jewelry untouched. Cash in a drawer untouched. Just one locked box in my closet opened.”
I remembered hearing about the break-in through attorneys. At the time, my lawyer had suggested Sylvie staged it to support her story. I had wanted to believe that because it made everything fit.
I sat back down slowly.
My life, which had already shifted once tonight, tilted again.
Maya touched Sylvie’s shoulder. “You need rest.”
“I know.” Sylvie’s eyes remained on me. “But he needs to hear this.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
Those two words changed something in her face.
For years, Sylvie had accused me of hearing only what I could solve. Perhaps she was right. Listening required surrendering the illusion that command was the same as care.
She reached into the folder again and took out a second packet.
“These are copies of what I could reconstruct from emails, screenshots, old lab notes. Not enough to prove everything. Enough to show something was wrong.”
I accepted the packet but did not open it yet.
There was too much in my hands already.
Maya walked to the bassinets and looked down. “They’re beautiful.”
Sylvie’s face softened. “Mara has Adrian’s frown.”
“I noticed,” Maya said.
“I do not frown that much,” I said automatically.
Both sisters looked at me.
For the first time in what felt like years, Sylvie laughed.
It was small and tired, but real.
The sound broke something open inside me.
I looked at the babies because looking at Sylvie was becoming difficult. Mara and Elise slept side by side, unaware that their arrival had pulled old secrets into fluorescent light.
“Why come back to New York?” I asked. “You could have delivered anywhere.”
Sylvie hesitated. “Because I wanted them born where we began.”
My throat tightened.
We had begun in New York. Not in boardrooms or courtrooms, but in a Columbia University lab where Sylvie had corrected my equation in front of six graduate students and then bought me terrible coffee because she felt slightly guilty. We had been young, ambitious, and certain the future would yield to effort.
I had loved her first for her mind.
Later for her courage.