Selene's POV
Kofi had complained about his head hurting that morning.
Selene had given him children's paracetamol and thought nothing of it—children got headaches, children got minor aches, it was the ordinary work of motherhood. But by noon, when she picked him up from nursery school, his skin was burning and his eyes had that glazed, distant quality that meant fever had taken hold of him properly.
She'd driven to St. Michael's Hospital in controlled panic, the kind of fear that didn't show on her face but lived in her hands as she gripped the steering wheel. Her three-year-old son, who was usually full of quiet observations and steady movements, was limp against her shoulder, his temperature climbing with each hour that passed.
By 3 PM, they had him in a private ward. By 4 PM, the doctors had run tests and assured her it was a viral infection—common in children, nothing dangerous if managed properly. They'd administered fluids, kept him on fever management protocols, and told her to wait.
Selene had learned to wait. She'd spent three years waiting—for Kofi to be born, for her business to launch, for her life to begin again. But waiting in a hospital chair while your child slept restlessly in a bed with IV lines was a different kind of waiting. This was the waiting that made time move backwards.
She sat in the hard plastic chair in the waiting area, her phone dead, her mind running in circles, and tried not to think about how small Kofi looked in that hospital bed.
"Is he okay?"
She looked up.
Damien Osei stood in the waiting area entrance, still in his work clothes—charcoal suit, white shirt, tie loosened slightly like he'd been running his hand through his hair. His expression was concerned in a way that had nothing to do with business.
"He has a viral fever," she said carefully. "They said it's manageable. He should be fine."
Damien sat down in the chair beside her—not across from her, but beside her. Close enough that she could feel his presence without having to look at him.
"I'm here because my nephew is in the pediatric ward," he said, like he'd anticipated her question. Like he understood that she needed context that didn't involve coincidence. "High fever. Dehydration. My sister called me in a panic, so I came."
Selene nodded slowly.
They sat in silence for a moment—the kind of silence that had weight to it. The kind that acknowledged everything that was unspoken between them and chose to honor it by saying nothing.
"His name is Kofi," Damien said quietly. "Your son. That's what the nurse called him."
"Yes." Selene's hands were gripping each other in her lap. She forced them to relax. "He's three."
"He looks like you."
It was a lie. Kofi looked nothing like her. Kofi looked like his father, and that fact was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore in the presence of his father, who was sitting beside her on a hard plastic hospital chair like he belonged there.
"He has my mother's eyes," Selene said carefully.
Damien didn't respond to that. Instead, he stood and disappeared toward the vending machine. He returned five minutes later with two cups of coffee that tasted like they'd been made from burnt water and broken promises.
"Sorry," he said, handing her one. "It's terrible."
"It is," she agreed, drinking it anyway because the bitterness felt honest.
They sat together for two hours.
In those two hours, there was no business conversation. No strategy discussion. No subtle interrogation disguised as small talk. There was just a man and a woman sitting in uncomfortable chairs, drinking bad coffee, and sharing the particular exhaustion that came from watching someone you loved be sick and vulnerable and completely outside your control.
He told her about his nephew—Marcus's son, five years old, already brilliant with numbers, would probably inherit the family business if he didn't become an engineer first. He said it the way a man spoke about someone he genuinely loved, not with the distant affection of obligation.
She told him about Kofi. About how he'd been born early, tiny enough to fit in her palm, so quiet that the nurses kept checking if he was breathing. About how he still moved through the world with that careful silence, like he'd learned early that observation was safer than noise.
"He sounds remarkable," Damien said.
"He is." Selene was quiet. "He's better than remarkable. He's good. Genuinely good in a way that makes me terrified because the world isn't kind to good people."
"No," Damien agreed. "It isn't. But it tries to be, sometimes. If you put good people in it. If you show them that good is worth protecting."
Selene looked at him then—really looked at him. And in the harsh fluorescent lighting of the hospital waiting area, she could see the man from The Black Veil more clearly than she'd seen him at the gala or the conference table. She could see the exhaustion in the lines around his eyes. Could see the quiet intensity that had nothing to do with business and everything to do with someone who'd spent years carrying weight alone.
Just like her.
A nurse appeared at 7 PM. "Ms. Obi? Kofi's temperature is starting to come down. The fever is breaking."
Selene stood immediately, relief flooding through her so intensely that her knees went weak.
"I'll come with you," Damien said, standing as well.
"You don't have to—"
"I know," he said, and there was something in his voice that made her realize he meant something much deeper than hospital protocol. "That's the point."
They walked back to the pediatric ward together. Kofi was still sleeping, but his skin was cooler now, his breathing deeper and more natural. The fever had released its grip.
Damien stood in the doorway while Selene moved to her son's bedside, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. In that moment, she felt the full weight of what she'd built—this beautiful, complicated life with a child who carried his father's face and a father who didn't yet know what he was looking at.
Damien stayed until 9 PM.
She didn't ask him to. She didn't suggest it or encourage it. But he sat in the chair outside Kofi's room, scrolling through his phone occasionally, reading from his tablet at one point, and simply... remaining. Present. Available. Like he understood that sometimes people didn't want company that talked. They wanted company that just existed beside them.
When he finally stood to leave, she walked him to the elevator.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
"You don't have to thank me." He pressed the elevator button. The doors opened. He stepped inside, then turned back to face her. "Kofi is lucky. To have someone who loves him that much. To have someone who survived alone so he wouldn't have to."
The doors were closing.
And in that closing moment, Selene saw something in Damien's expression—a flicker of emotion that looked like he was about to say something, about to ask her something, about to reveal something that had been burning inside him for three days.
But the doors closed before he could speak.
She stood alone in the hospital hallway, watching the elevator descend, and realized something that made her stomach drop:
He'd been testing her. The partnership offer, the coffee in the waiting room, the way he'd stayed until Kofi's fever broke without being asked. It had all been testing. Testing to see if she would soften. Testing to see if she would let him into her world. Testing to see if she would recognize him as something other than an enemy.
And she had.
That was the terrifying part.
Because sitting beside him in that waiting room, watching him worry about his nephew with the same quiet intensity she worried about Kofi, she'd felt something shift inside her. Something that suggested that maybe her plan to destroy Damien Osei had been built on a foundation that was far shakier than she'd realized.
Her phone buzzed.
Text from unknown number—but she knew whose number it was now: "Kofi is beautiful. He has your strength. I'm glad I got to sit with you while he recovered. I'd like to do it again sometime—not in a hospital. Somewhere that has good coffee and better conversation. Would you consider that?"
Selene stared at that message.
He was asking her on a date.
He was asking her out while still not acknowledging that he knew she knew that he knew her. He was playing the long game—building something that might bridge the distance between them without forcing the confrontation that both of them were terrified of.
She should delete the message.
Instead, she stared at it for five minutes. Then she closed the message without responding.
But she didn't delete it either.