CHAPTER 3 – The Truth He Could Not Outbid
Inside the apartment, nothing looked like him.
No marble.
No silence engineered for power.
Just life.
Too small.
Too real.
Too expensive in ways money could not fix.
Lucy didn’t offer him a seat.
She didn’t need to.
“You found us,” she said.
“I didn’t know I was looking,” Sebastian replied.
That was the first honest thing he had said in years.
One of the boys sat on the couch, still holding his notebook.
The other stayed close to Lucy.
Guarding her.
That detail hurt more than anything.
Because it meant they had already learned protection before they had learned trust.
“I never kept them from you,” Lucy said finally.
“I tried,” Sebastian interrupted.
“No,” she said.
A pause.
“You tried to make your life not include us.”
Silence.
Because there was no argument for that.
Sebastian looked at the boys again.
“Are they mine?”
Lucy didn’t answer immediately.
Instead, she walked to the kitchen counter and opened a drawer.
She placed a folded document on the table.
Birth certificates.
His name.
Unmistakable.
He didn’t touch them at first.
Because some truths feel heavier than paper.
“I didn’t want your money,” Lucy said. “I didn’t want your lawyers. I didn’t want your version of responsibility that only shows up when cameras are involved.”
Sebastian’s jaw tightened.
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” she agreed softly.
“It’s just true.”
One of the boys looked up.
The quieter one.
“Are you the man in the news?” he asked.
Sebastian blinked.
“Yes.”
The boy considered that.
Then said:
“You look more tired than you do in pictures.”
Something in Sebastian cracked again.
This time deeper.
Because children don’t lie to soften reality.
They just see it.
Lucy stepped forward.
“You can leave,” she said. “That’s still your choice.”
A pause.
“But now you know.”
Sebastian looked at the boys.
At what he had built his entire life without.
And for the first time—
he didn’t want to leave a room he could afford.
He wanted to stay in one he didn’t deserve.
“I’m not leaving,” he said.
Lucy’s eyes sharpened.
“Then don’t damage them.”
That wasn’t a threat.
It was a boundary.
May you like
And Sebastian understood it immediately.
More clearly than any contract he had ever signed.
