The question arrived, as it always did, without warning.
Not at bedtime, when Liana had learned to brace for the hard ones. Not in the car, where she had the windshield to look at and both hands usefully occupied. It came at breakfast, on a Wednesday, while Ethan was eating toast and she was refilling her coffee and thinking about a load-bearing wall she needed to redesign before Friday.
"Mom, who's my dad?"
Her hand tightened around the coffee pot. For a moment, she forgot to breathe.
She had a practiced answer for this. She'd been practicing it since before he could form the question — running it in her head at three in the morning, testing different versions for different ages, different moods, different contexts. She knew the words. She'd used them before.
She turned around.
Ethan was watching her with his toast in both hands—pale grey eyes startling against his warm brown skin and dark curls—the expression of someone who had asked a simple question and waited for a simple answer.
"Some families have a mom and dad," she said. "Some have just a mom."
"Like Marcus at school. He has two moms."
"Right. Families are different."
"I know that." He took a bite of toast. "But Marcus's moms are both real. I don't have a dad who's real."
She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down. It was either that or keep standing, and standing felt like she was delivering news rather than having a conversation.
"Your dad is real," she said carefully.
Ethan considered this with the focused attention he gave to things that mattered.
"Does he know about me?"
The question landed exactly where it always did—just left of center, where the scar tissue lived.
"That's complicated," she said.
"Because he doesn't know?"
She'd always told herself she wouldn't lie to him. She hadn't promised herself she'd tell him everything — not yet, not at five, not while he was still too young to carry the full weight of it. But she'd promised herself no lies.
"He didn't know," she said. "When you were very little."
"Does he know now?"
She thought about the email. The phone call in the dark. I'll be at the meeting.
"Things are changing," she said. "Grown-up things. When I understand them better, I'll explain them to you. I promise."
Ethan looked at her for a long moment with those eyes that saw too much for a five-year-old. Then he nodded, which was both a relief and a small heartbreak, because it meant he had learned, somehow, to accept incomplete answers. She didn't know when that had happened. She wasn't sure she was glad it had.
"Okay," he said, and went back to his toast.
She sat across from him, drank her coffee, kept her face neutral, and thought: not yet. Not now. But soon.
She dropped him at Hartwell Montessori at eight-thirty, which was technically five minutes late and practically on time, depending on how strictly you interpreted Ms. Devereux's guidance on the matter. Ethan walked in without looking back, which she took as confidence rather than indifference, even though the distinction sometimes felt academic.
On the way back to the studio, her phone rang through the car speakers.
"Daniel."
"Good morning." His voice was warm in the uncomplicated way she'd always appreciated about him — warmth that didn't cost anything, didn't want anything back. "I heard back from the Blackwell development team."
"Already?"
"I have contacts there. Cole Industries sent a formal letter of intent. They're serious about partnership."
She kept her eyes on the road. "I'm aware."
"You knew?"
"I got their email on Tuesday. We've responded."
A longer pause this time.
"Liana, if you need legal support, I have people—"
"I have lawyers."
"Good ones?"
"Good enough." She changed lanes with more certainty than she felt she had. "I appreciate the information, Daniel. I mean that."
"I know you do."
And then, because he always seemed to know exactly how much pressure she could take before it became something she'd close off against:
"How's Ethan?"
The shift worked, as it always did.
"He asked about his father this morning."
"What did you say?"
"As little as possible. As honestly as possible." She thought of those grey eyes watching her across the breakfast table. "He's five. He's going to be okay."
"He's going to be great," Daniel said, with the particular certainty of someone who'd spent enough time around Ethan to have an opinion worth trusting. "He's got your spine."
"He's got my stubbornness."
"Dinner Friday? Just friends. Not work. Just dinner, if you want company."
She almost said no. She had the refusal loaded and ready — she was good at those, too. But she thought about the apartment in the evening after Ethan was in bed, and the drawer on the left side of the nightstand, and the decision she'd made in the dark that she was going to have to handle this herself.
The company was sometimes its own kind of armor.
"Friday," she said. "Somewhere with good bread."
"I know three places."
"Pick the one with the best bread."
"Done." He paused. "Liana."
"Mm."
"You'll handle this. Whatever Cole does—you've built something real. That doesn't disappear."
She thought of HART Studio on a Tuesday morning. The smell of espresso and warm brick. The skylight in the brownstone she'd finally solved. The Caldwell handshake.
"I know," she said.
She did know. That was the part that wasn't the problem.
The drawing appeared that afternoon.
She was at her desk when she heard the school bus—Ethan took the afternoon bus on Wednesdays, which he regarded as one of the great privileges of his life—then the sound of the front door, managed by Mrs. Okonkwo downstairs, then Ethan's footsteps, which she could identify with the precision of someone who had listened to him learn to walk.
He appeared in the doorway of her home office with his backpack still on and a piece of paper in his hand.
"I made something," he said.
"Come here."
He crossed the room and held it out. She took it.
It was a drawing in blue and brown crayon, the kind of committed, unselfconscious art that children produced before they learned to second-guess themselves. Two figures — one taller, one small — standing next to something that might have been a building or a very rectangular tree.
The small figure had curly hair. The tall figure had no distinguishing features that she could immediately identify, except for two small, careful dots of grey crayon where the eyes should be.
She looked at it for a long moment.
"Who is this?" she asked, though she already knew.
Ethan pointed to the small figure.
"Me."
Then the tall figure.
"My dad."
She kept her face still.
"You don't know what he looks like."
"I know he's tall," Ethan said, as though this was obvious information she should have. "And I think he has eyes like mine." He pointed to the grey dots. "Because sometimes you look at me and you go like this—"
He did an impression of her expression that was both inaccurate and devastating, a kind of brief, faraway look that she hadn't known she made.
"Like you're seeing something else."
She placed the drawing down, hands steady, but her heart tight.
"That's a very good drawing," she said.
Ethan looked at it with his head tilted.
"The building's wrong. But I can fix it tomorrow."
"Leave it," she said. "I like it."
He looked at her. She looked at him.
"Mom," he said.
"Yes."
"I don't mind. That he wasn't here." He said it with the matter-of-fact generosity that children had before the world taught them to be careful with it. "You were here. That was enough."
She hugged him before he could see her face,arms tight around his backpack and wholly earnest heart, holding on a heartbeat longer than needed.
"You," she said into his curls, "are the best thing I have ever done."
"Better than the Henderson commission?"
"The Henderson commission isn't even in the running."
He patted her arm, satisfied, and wriggled free and went to find his snack.
She sat at her desk for a moment after he left. The drawing was in front of her — the two figures, the grey crayon eyes, the building that wasn't quite right but that Ethan had decided she should keep anyway.
She picked up her phone.
There was an email notification at the top of the screen.
Cole Industries — Re: Blackwell Centre Initial Meeting — Confirmed Thursday, 10 AM, HART Studio.
Thursday.
Forty-eight hours.
She set the phone face down on the desk, next to the drawing of the father with grey eyes that she was going to keep.