The photograph in Emily Carter’s hand should have been harmless—a smiling woman standing beside a Christmas tree with one arm around her daughter—but the moment I saw it, every word disappeared from my mouth. I knew that woman. More importantly, I knew her in a way no man dating her daughter would ever want to explain.

Chapter 1

Emily noticed my expression immediately. “What?”

I forced myself to blink. “Nothing.”

“That was definitely not a nothing face.”

We were sitting at a small Italian restaurant in downtown Denver, halfway through dinner. Emily had been telling me that her mother might visit from Arizona the following month, and she had pulled out her phone to show me photographs from the previous Christmas. I expected family pictures, maybe a dog, maybe a badly decorated tree.

Instead, I found myself staring at Catherine Monroe.

My former boss.

The woman I had slept with for nearly two years.

I felt as though the floor had shifted beneath my chair.

Emily tapped the picture. “That’s my mom. Catherine. I think I’ve mentioned her before.”

“You have.”

Apparently, I had never paid enough attention to her mother’s name.

Catherine was common enough, and Emily used her mother’s maiden name, Carter, professionally. I had never seen a photograph. She had told me only that she was raised by a divorced mother who worked in technology and had moved to Arizona several years earlier.

That description could have fit thousands of women.

Unfortunately, it fit one woman far too well.

I met Catherine when I was twenty-three and fresh out of college. She was fifty-one, divorced, confident, and the director of software development at a small cybersecurity company in Austin, Texas. I had been hired as a junior programmer, thrilled simply to have a job with health insurance and a desk that wasn’t in my childhood bedroom.

Catherine intimidated almost everyone.

She never raised her voice, which somehow made her more frightening. If someone entered a meeting unprepared, she didn’t embarrass them. She simply asked three quiet questions until they embarrassed themselves.

For reasons I never fully understood, she liked me.

At first, our relationship was completely professional. She took an interest in my work because I was young, ambitious, and willing to take assignments nobody else wanted. We spent long hours reviewing projects, and sometimes she would invite me to lunch to discuss career plans.

Then my girlfriend left me.

A few months later, Catherine finalized a bitter divorce.

Two lonely people started talking about things that had nothing to do with software.

I knew sleeping with my boss was a terrible idea. Catherine knew it too. We discussed every reason not to do it.

Then we did it anyway.

There was never a promise of love. She did not pretend she wanted another husband, and I was too young to imagine building a future with a woman nearly thirty years older than me. What began as flirting became a private arrangement that lasted far longer than either of us expected.

We were careful at work.

Outside work, we were less careful.

Yet one subject rarely came up.

Family.

I knew Catherine had a daughter somewhere around my age. That was about it. Catherine once told me her daughter had gone into the same general field, but she never showed me photographs or told me much about her.

Looking back, perhaps that was deliberate.

Three years after I joined the company, I accepted a better position in Colorado. Catherine and I ended things without drama. There was no heartbreak, no screaming, no final declaration.

We hugged in her kitchen the night before I left.

“You’re going to do well,” she told me.

“So are you.”

“I already do well.”

I laughed. “There’s the ego.”

She kissed my cheek and said, “Goodbye, Ryan.”

And that was it.

Or so I believed.

Two years later, I met Emily.

We worked for companies that partnered on several software projects. She was twenty-eight, funny without trying to be, stubborn in meetings, and incapable of pretending to agree with bad ideas.

The first time I asked her to dinner, she said, “Is this a date or one of those networking dinners where we pretend not to talk about work and then talk about work for two hours?”

“A date.”

“Good. I hate networking dinners.”

That was six months ago.

We had been seeing each other exclusively for five months.

I had begun thinking about asking her to move in with me.

Now I was sitting across from her, looking at a photograph of her mother and wondering whether the universe had a cruel sense of humor.

Emily narrowed her eyes. “You know her.”

It was not a question.

I should have told her right then.

Instead, panic won.

“I think she looks familiar.”

“From where?”

“I’m not sure.”

Emily studied my face for another moment. Then she put her phone down.

“She worked in Austin for years.”

My heart began pounding harder.

“What company?”

She told me.

There was no possibility left.

I reached for my water because my mouth had gone dry.

Emily smiled faintly. “This is weird. You look like somebody just told you there’s a body in your trunk.”

“I’m fine.”

It was a stupid lie.

She changed the subject, but dinner was ruined for me. Every time Emily touched my hand, I remembered Catherine’s hand. Every similarity I had somehow missed before became obvious.

The same dark eyes.

The same laugh when something genuinely surprised them.

Even the same habit of tilting their head when they thought someone was hiding something.

By the time I drove Emily home, I knew one thing with absolute certainty.

I could not keep this secret.

But I also knew that the moment I told her, I might lose her.

At her apartment door, Emily kissed me.

“You’re quiet tonight.”

“Long day.”

She smiled. “Come over Saturday?”

“Absolutely.”

She went inside.

I stood in the hallway long after the door closed.

Then my phone buzzed.

A message from Emily.

Mom says your name sounds familiar. She wants to know if you ever worked at Hawthorne Cybersecurity.

I stared at the screen.

A second message appeared.

Ryan?

Then a third.

What exactly aren’t you telling me?