Too Late, My Ex-Wife: Her Regret After Our Daughter's Death

Chapter 5: The Right Kind of Man

Third Person's POV:

"I owe you an apology," Roman said.

Vivienne turned from the window. He stood a few feet away, not crowding her, just there. That was the thing about Roman. He never crowded.

"You don't need to apologize," she said.

"I do." He shook his head slightly. "I shouldn't have called you this morning. I panicked, and I reached for the person I trusted most without thinking about what it would cost you. That was selfish of me."

She looked at him for a moment.

Nathan had not once in seven years apologized without turning it into a tally of everything she owed him afterward. Roman just said the thing and waited, and didn't ask for anything in return.

"Your son needed help," she said. "Stop apologizing."

"He's fine, by the way." A small smile. "Already asking about lunch."

"Of course he is."

Roman looked out the window. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"Vivienne."

"I said I'm fine." She exhaled. "Nathan just, he does that. He finds the one moment when something's finally going right for me and walks straight into the middle of it." She stopped herself. "Six months you've spent working alongside me. Traveling, sitting through negotiations, giving up your own weekends. Meanwhile he stays home and manages the house and acts like that makes us equal partners. And then he stands in a hospital corridor and calls me a bad mother."

Roman was quiet for a moment.

"You're not a bad mother," he said.

"He thinks I am."

"Nathan thinks a lot of things that are really about Nathan." He said it evenly, without heat. "That doesn't make any of them your problem."

Vivienne looked away.

She knew Nathan was scared about Lily. She wasn't without a heart. But there was scared, and then there was what Nathan did, which was take every fear he had and turn it into a weapon he could point back at her. 

Lily had been fine that morning. Laughing at breakfast. Running to get her backpack. Children didn't just collapse because their mother had somewhere else to be.

"He told me I was playing happy family with another man's child," she said. "In front of you. In front of the nurses."

"You didn't steal anything," Roman said quietly. "You built your company. You worked for everything you have. That's yours, Vivienne. Nobody handed it to you." A pause, gentler. "Maybe he's just insecure about your success. I know it's hard to hear, but try to understand him too, even now."

She didn't answer.

Down the corridor, his son appeared from the ward room, bag on one shoulder, toy car in hand, looking entirely unbothered by his morning in hospital. He spotted Vivienne and came straight over.

"Are we getting lunch," he said. "I want noodles."

"You just had a stomach episode."

"Soup noodles. That's basically soup."

"That is not basically soup."

He looked at Roman for backup. Roman gave him nothing.

"Go say thank you to the nurses," Roman said. "Then we'll talk about lunch."

The boy sighed and went.

Vivienne watched him walk away. "He's a good kid."

"He has his moments." Roman watched the corner where his son disappeared. "His birthday's coming up soon. He gets like this every year. Overexcited."

Vivienne looked at him.

"He's been talking about it for weeks," Roman said. "I'm not asking for anything. I just, he doesn't have a lot of people since his mother left. I want it to be a good day for him."

Something snagged at the back of her mind. A date, attached to something, that she couldn't quite place.

Before it surfaced, the boy was back, having completed the fastest thank-you in nursing history, looking between the two adults the way children do when they sense a conversation was about them.

"Did you tell her?" he said to Roman.

"I was getting there."

"Getting where." He looked at Vivienne directly. "Will you come to my birthday?"

Roman closed his eyes briefly. "We talked about this."

"You said I couldn't ask. I'm asking anyway."

"Vivienne has her own family, her own..."

"It's okay," Vivienne said.

They both stopped.

She'd placed the date by then. She knew exactly what day it landed on. She knew what she'd promised Nathan at four in the morning.

But she looked at this boy standing in a hospital corridor asking for one afternoon, and that promise felt very far away from this moment.

"I'll be there," she said.

His face changed completely. He grabbed her arm with both hands, shook it once like that sealed it, and ran ahead toward the exit.

Roman looked at her. "You didn't have to do that."

"I know."

"The birthday." He said it carefully. "It's the same day as."

"I know," she said again.

He held her gaze a moment, something unreadable in his expression. Then he nodded and looked away.

His phone rang.

He glanced at the screen, and something shifted in his face, quick and controlled. He turned away. "One moment."

He walked to the far end of the corridor, near the empty emergency exit, and his voice dropped low—though in the quiet hospital, it carried further than he intended.

"I told you, I need more time. I'm arranging everything properly, and I'll have it soon." A pause. He listened, jaw tightening. "I understand. I understand that. But if you go public with this now, it destroys everything I've built." A longer pause. "She trusts me. Completely. Give me three weeks and I'll have the investment secured. After that, your money's back with interest, and we never speak again." His voice dropped further. "Three weeks. That's all I'm asking."

He hung up.

He stood with his back to the corridor for a moment, shoulders dropping slowly. Then he turned and walked back to her, his smile arriving just a fraction ahead of the rest of his face.

"Sorry," he said. "Work thing."

"Is everything okay?" she asked politely.

"Fine. Ready to go."

Vivienne looked at him a second longer than usual. Something had been off in the set of his jaw right before that smile clicked into place.