“We need to discuss what happens now,” Liam said.
“We will.”
“Privately.”
“Through counsel first.”
His eyes sharpened.
“I’m their father.”
“Yes.”
“And he is what?”
There it was.
The question that finally made Khloe step completely away from him.
Olivia looked at the woman Liam had chosen because she fit the life he claimed to want.
Khloe’s face was no longer panicked.
It was cold.
She had understood something before Liam did.
This was not a man suddenly overwhelmed by fatherhood.
This was a man discovering that the woman he discarded had become unreachable without becoming miserable.
Olivia turned back to him.
“The babies are yours,” she said quietly.
“My life isn’t.”
Liam said nothing.
The cameras did.
Shutters burst from the archway in rapid succession.
He looked toward them and for the first time that night seemed genuinely powerless.
Khloe folded her arms.
“You told me this marriage was dead long before you met me,” she said.
“It was.”
“Then why are you acting like she cheated on you by surviving it?”
Liam’s face tightened.
“Khloe, not here.”
She gave a short, humorless laugh.
“Apparently everything is here.”
Olivia did not enjoy the moment as much as she once might have imagined.
There was no satisfaction in watching three people discover different pieces of the same ugly truth.
She had loved Liam.
Khloe had believed him.
And Liam, perhaps most of all, had believed the version of himself he sold to everyone else.
Olivia gathered the remaining papers and placed them back into the folder.
She left the copies that belonged to him on the console.
The scan stayed in his hand.
“That one is yours,” she said.
He looked down at it.
His thumb trembled once against the border.
“Olivia.”
She paused.
For a second he looked like the man from Queens again.
Not a billionaire founder.
Not the subject of glossy profiles.
Just Liam.
“I made a mistake,” he said.
The corridor went quiet.
Olivia knew he meant more than one thing and less than everything.
He meant the divorce.
He meant the model.
He meant the cameras.
He meant the babies he had not known existed.
But remorse arriving after consequences was not the same thing as love arriving on time.
