Chapter 2 - Forty-Eight HoursTo understand what he was looking at, you'd have to go back to the Tuesday morning, forty-eight hours before that ballroom, when a woman Gideon had never met walked into his office at Kessler Holdings with a case file and a six-year-old girl holding tightly to her hand.
"Mr. Kessler," the woman said, introducing herself as Priya Osei, a caseworker with Ravenswood County Child Services, "this is Sage. I believe you may be her biological father."
Gideon remembered almost nothing about the next several minutes except the sound of his own heartbeat, and the girl's eyes, which were, unmistakably, his mother's eyes — the same pale gray-green he saw in the mirror every morning, staring back at him from a face that belonged to a stranger.
Elise Bramwell. He hadn't heard that name in nearly seven years, not since a brief, quiet relationship during a stretch of his life he'd mostly stopped talking about — a woman he'd met at a conference in Ravenswood who'd never quite fit into the version of his life his family expected him to build, and who had, as far as he'd understood at the time, simply stopped returning his calls one autumn and disappeared from it entirely.
"She passed away four months ago," Priya told him gently. "A car accident outside Millbrook Crossing. Sage has been in emergency foster placement since then while we tried to locate any biological family. Your name was listed on a private document Elise had filed with an attorney years ago — never finalized as a formal paternity claim, but enough for us to run a DNA comparison once we found it. The results came back Monday."
Gideon had a daughter. He had had a daughter, apparently, for six years, and had not known it for a single day of them.
The next forty-eight hours blurred into a sequence of decisions made faster than any decision in his life had ever been made before — emergency custody paperwork, a scrambled call to his family attorney, a guest suite hastily prepared, and the far harder task of explaining, in a house full of people who had strong opinions about everything, that there was suddenly a six-year-old girl living in it who stood to inherit a share of everything the Kessler name represented.
His mother, Eleanor, had received the news with the particular icy composure she reserved for anything that threatened the tidiness of the family's public image. His brother, Preston, had said almost nothing at all — a silence Gideon had, at the time, mistaken for shock rather than calculation.
May you like
The gala had been scheduled for months, a fundraiser for the Ravenswood Children's Hospital that Gideon couldn't cancel without drawing exactly the kind of attention he was trying to avoid before he'd even had time to process what having a daughter meant. He'd told himself bringing Sage down for twenty minutes, introducing her quietly to a handful of close family friends, would be manageable.
He had not accounted for a woman in a red dress, or for whoever had made sure security stood down and let her get close enough to try.
