Selene's POV
She couldn't stop thinking about what he'd said at the gala.
"You always did see things other people couldn't."
Not "you seem to," not "I've heard," but always. Like he'd watched her work before. Like he'd studied the way her mind operated with enough attention to develop conclusions about her patterns.
Like he remembered.
Selene had spent three days trying to convince herself it was coincidence. Three days of throwing herself into work, of pretending the text didn't exist, of acting like a man knowing about her grandmother's textile legacy was something that could be explained through normal business research.
But the gala comment wouldn't stop replaying in her mind. And the way he'd looked at her in that conference room negotiation. And the particular quality of his voice when he said things that shouldn't have been possible for him to know.
By evening, alone in her bedroom while Kofi slept, Selene made a decision she'd been avoiding for three years.
She opened the drawer where she kept the London notebook.
It was small, leather-bound, filled with her handwriting from a time when writing was the only way she knew how to survive. When she was pregnant and alone and terrified, and the only person she could talk to was the blank pages that would never judge her.
She opened to a random page.
"He held my hand. Just held it. Didn't try to fix anything. Didn't ask questions. Just sat beside me like he understood that sometimes being alone is the thing that breaks you, and someone sitting next to you doesn't fix that, but it makes it bearable. His hands were warm. I think I'll remember his hands forever."
She stared at that sentence.
Her hands had been shaking when she wrote it. She could see it in the slightly uneven letters, the pressure variations in the pen strokes. She'd been writing about a stranger who'd held her together during the worst night of her life.
A stranger with quiet hands.
A stranger she'd never learned the name of.
Selene turned to another page, deeper in the notebook. This one from six weeks later, after she'd taken the pregnancy test and confirmed what she'd suspected.
"The boy—because I don't know if it's a boy yet, but somehow I know it is—he'll need a name that means something. Something that honors the night he was conceived, but doesn't burden him with it. Something that speaks to survival. To quiet strength. To the kind of resilience that looks like peace but is actually a revolution happening in silence."
She'd named him Kofi. A name that meant born on Friday—the day she'd done the test, the day her entire life had reorganized itself around this small person growing inside her.
But she'd also named him deliberately, knowing he would carry the imprint of that night. That one night that had changed everything.
Selene flipped through more pages. Each entry was a window into a version of herself she'd learned to lock away. A version that had been broken and alone and so desperately in love with a stranger that she'd spent three years building an entire life partly to honor him, partly to survive the loss of him.
Then she found the entry she'd been subconsciously searching for.
"He said, 'You're going to be okay.' I asked him how he knew. He said, 'Because you didn't break today. You left. The people who can walk away from their own pain—those are the ones who survive it.' I think I'll spend the rest of my life trying to live up to that. Trying to be the kind of person he believed I was. Even though I'll never see him again."
Selene's throat tightened.
She'd written that the morning after The Black Veil. She'd been hungover and terrified and so grateful for the stranger's faith in her that she'd spent three years proving him right. She'd left her pain. She'd survived it. She'd built something beautiful from the wreckage.
And apparently, that stranger had spent the same three years looking for her.
The thought was devastating in ways she couldn't articulate.
Because if Damien Osei was the man from The Black Veil—and everything inside her now screamed that he was—then his presence in her business world wasn't coincidence. It was obsession. It was a man spending three years trying to solve a puzzle that was his own missing night.
She closed the notebook slowly.
But she didn't put it away.
Instead, she left it open on her bed—folded back to that final entry—like she was asking herself to bear witness to her own truth. Like she was forcing herself to confront the fact that the man she'd planned to destroy was the same man she'd spent three years unconsciously honoring through her choices.
Through her son's name.
Through the way she'd built her life—not just for herself, but as an answer to something he'd said to a stranger in a masked bar three years ago.
Her phone buzzed.
She didn't look at it immediately. She already knew who it was. Already knew what the message would say—something that acknowledged without demanding, that invited without pressuring, that showed he was thinking about her without overwhelming her with the weight of three years of searching.
Finally, she picked up the phone.
The text read: "I've been thinking about what I said at the gala. About you always seeing things other people couldn't. I'm wondering if you see me. If you see what I'm trying to say without actually speaking it. If you know that I've been looking for you since the night you disappeared into a city that suddenly made sense only because you were in it."
Selene stared at that message.
It was a confession.
It was an admission.
It was a man finally saying out loud what his actions had been screaming for three days: I know you. I've known you. I've been looking for you.
She should delete it.
She should block his number.
She should do any number of things that would protect the carefully constructed walls she'd built to keep herself safe.
Instead, she read it three times.
Then she read the London notebook entry again.
Then she looked at the drawing Kofi had made—still in her bag, still her secret—and realized something that terrified her:
The man she was supposed to destroy was the same man who'd told her she was strong enough to survive. The same man who'd held her hand when the world fell apart. The same man whose son she'd raised alone, whose blood ran through her child's veins, whose absence had shaped every decision she'd made for three years.
She shut the notebook.
But she didn't put it away.
Instead, she left it on her bed like an unanswered question, like a confession waiting to be claimed, like a woman finally admitting to herself that she'd been in love with a stranger for three years and had spent all that time building a life designed to prove his faith in her had been justified.