The Singapore skyline blurred in the evening rain as Adrian Harmon stood at his hotel window, phone pressed to his ear, listening to a corporate headhunter pitch him on yet another lucrative position that would keep him overseas for another eighteen months. At forty-two, Adrian was lean from hotel gym sessions and too many working dinners, his dark hair showing silver at the temples in a way that made him look distinguished rather than tired—though he was definitely the latter. “Two years in Southeast Asia and you’ve tripled their efficiency metrics,” the headhunter said, his voice warm with the hunger of someone who stood to make a substantial commission.
“Adrian, you’re exactly what the Seoul division needs.
The compensation package alone—”
“Send me the contract details,” Adrian interrupted, watching raindrops race down the glass. “I’ll review them tonight.”
After he hung up, his phone buzzed with a text from his wife, Denise: “Tommy’s fine.
Stop worrying. Focus on your work.”
Adrian stared at the message with the faint disorientation of someone hearing an answer to a question they hadn’t asked.
That was the thing that had been bothering him lately—the way Denise always seemed to know when he was thinking about their twelve-year-old son and always arrived with reassurance he hadn’t requested.
It felt less like intuition and more like preemptive damage control. They’d been married fourteen years, together since college, and somewhere in the chaos of his career ascension, the warmth between them had cooled to something transactional. Denise managed the house in Colorado, Adrian paid for it from whatever corner of the globe his consulting work took him, and both of them pretended that counted as intimacy.
Adrian had grown up in foster care, bouncing between homes until he aged out at eighteen.
He’d clawed his way through state college on scholarships and sheer spite, driven by a promise he’d made to himself while staring at his reflection in a group home bathroom mirror: My family will be different. Stable.
Loving. Everything I never had.
But three weeks ago, something had shifted, and his instincts—those old survival instincts honed in foster care that he could never fully turn off—had started humming a warning he couldn’t ignore.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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