Chapter 5: The Interrogation
The knock came three days later, not in the middle of the night as she’d feared, but in the sharp, clear light of late afternoon. It was a firm, insistent rapping that vibrated through the cheap wood of the door. Adam was down for his nap, the apartment silent save for the hum of the refrigerator. Hana took a breath that felt like shards of glass in her lungs, smoothed her plain cotton t-shirt, and opened the door.
Xavier stood there, filling the frame. He was a discordant note in her hallway, a sculpture of expensive wool and implicit power against the peeling paint. He looked older. Not in years, but in the tension around his eyes, the grim set of his mouth that had lost its perpetual, easy charm. The air between them didn’t just thicken; it congealed.
“Hana.”
She didn’t step back. “Xavier.”
He walked in without waiting for an invitation, his gaze sweeping the room—the mismatched chairs, the crowded bookshelves, the single framed photo of a younger, softer version of himself on her desk. His eyes lingered on a bright plastic fire truck abandoned on the rug. A muscle in his jaw twitched.
“Why are you here?” Her voice was steadier than she felt.
He turned to face her fully. “Why did you ghost yourself? You vanished. You became… this.” He gestured vaguely at the apartment, the gesture dismissive, and it stung more than any direct insult.
“I answered that before I left,” she said, crossing her arms. It was a defensive gesture, but she needed to hold herself together. “The ultimatum. Choose her, or I would be gone from your life. You made your choice. This is the outcome.”
His expression hardened. “That was about work. About loyalty.”
“It was about everything,” she said, a quiet heat entering her words. “And you chose her. You rejected me. I was just helping you get rid of me. You got what you wanted. Hana Lim is dead. She no longer exists.”
“Don’t be dramatic.” He took a step closer, his cologne invading the space, overlaying the scents of lavender and home. “This isn’t about some professional slight. This is about a child. Who is he, Hana?”
She had rehearsed the lie. A name floated to her lips—Mark, a consultant from Atlanta, brief, forgettable, now in Dubai. She opened her mouth to give him the story she and James had constructed.
But he spoke first, his voice dropping, laced with a terrible, misplaced protectiveness. “You don’t have to protect him. Or hide what happened. I’ve pieced it together. The timing. Your sudden disappearance. You were alone, you were vulnerable.” He searched her face, his own filling with a pained certainty. “Were you forced? Or were you too drunk to even know what was happening? Is that why you ran? Because you were ashamed? Afraid everyone would find out?”
The sheer, staggering wrongness of his assumption stole her breath. He had woven a narrative of victimhood, a tragedy where she was a helpless, damaged thing. It was so far from the chaotic, soul-annihilating truth that a hysterical laugh threatened to bubble up in her throat. He saw a violation. Not a mutual, blurry, devastating mistake born of his own despair and her own misplaced love.
“You think I’m ashamed of being a single mother?” she finally managed, her voice thin.
“I think you were scared,” he asserted, his tone brooking no argument. “Scared of the gossip, the judgment. Scared of facing it alone.” He took another step, his proximity overwhelming. “You don’t have to be scared anymore. And you don’t have to be alone.”
He drew a slow breath, as if steeling himself for a boardroom merger. The words came out measured, deliberate, a solution he was presenting.
“Marry me.”
The world narrowed to the two words hanging in the sunlit dust motes between them.
“I will accept the child as my own,” he continued, the proposal unfolding like a business contract. “Legally, socially, in every way that matters. You can come back to New York. You can be Hana again. The life you left behind, your position, your respect… it’s all waiting for you. I’ll fix this.”
He looked at her, expecting relief. Expecting gratitude. He saw his offer as a rescue, a magnificent absolution for a sin he believed she had suffered.
He had meticulously dissected her life, unearthed her secrets, and arrived at the most catastrophic possible conclusion. And his solution was to erase it all. To erase Adam’s origin, her choice, her entire existence here, and slot her back into her old role, now with a gold band and a tragic backstory he had invented. He wanted to marry a ghost, a fiction. He wanted to adopt his own son while looking him in the eye, utterly oblivious.
Hana stared at him, at this man she had loved with a quiet, desperate ache for half her life. She saw the unwavering conviction in his eyes, the absolute confidence that he had solved her. The pounding in her chest was no longer fear. It was a furious, roaring tide of something else entirely.
From down the hall, a small, sleepy cry pierced the silence. Adam, stirring from his nap.
Xavier’s eyes flickered toward the sound, then back to her, his expression softening with what he thought was understanding. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, his voice gentle now. “I’m here.”
The cry came again, a little more insistent. Hana didn’t move. She held Xavier’s gaze, the last vestige of the woman he knew—the compliant, patient Hana—crumbling away entirely.
“You’re here,” she repeated, her voice flat and final. “But you have no idea where here is.”
“But you have no idea where here is.”
She turned and walked away from him, down the short hallway toward the sound. The door to her bedroom was ajar, letting a slice of afternoon sun fall across the worn floorboards. Inside, Adam was sitting up in his crib, his hair tousled from sleep, his small fists rubbing his eyes. The sight of him, rumpled and real, steadied her.
“Hey, little bear,” she murmured, her voice instinctively softening into a melody he knew.
She lifted him out, his small body warm and heavy against her chest. He buried his face in her neck, his breathing still thick with sleep. She swayed gently, a slow back-and-forth motion that had soothed a thousand tiny storms. By the time she carried him back into the living room, his curiosity had overtaken the last dregs of grogginess.
Xavier hadn’t moved. He watched them enter, his entire posture rigid, as if witnessing an alien ritual. Adam peered over Hana’s shoulder, his wide hazel eyes—those unmistakable eyes—locking onto the stranger. There was no fear in his gaze, only a frank, open assessment. He stared, unblinking, at the man who shared his features in every way but recognition.
The silence stretched, punctured only by the distant putter of a motorcycle on the street. Xavier’s expression was one of pure, arrested shock, as if seeing the child up close was a physical blow.
“He looks…” Xavier began, but the sentence died.
“Like me,” Hana finished, her voice clear. She adjusted Adam on her hip. “Yes. Everyone says that.”
She walked to the sofa and sat down, settling Adam beside her with a worn board book. He immediately began patting the colorful pages, but his attention kept drifting back to Xavier, studying him with a solemn fascination.
“What you think happened,” Hana said, looking directly at Xavier now, “didn’t happen. No one forced me. I wasn’t attacked or… coerced. I wasn’t some victim hiding in shame.”
Xavier opened his mouth, but she held up a hand, stopping him.
“I chose this. All of it. I chose to leave. I chose to have him. I chose this life, in this apartment, with these books.” She gestured around the room, her defiance quiet and absolute. “The father… he didn’t know. And I chose to keep it that way.”
Xavier finally found his voice, but it was strained. “Why? Was he married? Some worthless bastard who wouldn’t step up?” He took a step forward, his focus sharpening. “Tell me who. Just tell me his name. I’ll handle it.”
“You’re not listening.” A flicker of old frustration, the kind she used to feel when he ignored her schedules, passed over her face. “I don’t want him ‘handled.’ I don’t want him found. He has no place here. This,” she said, her arm circling the space around herself and Adam, “is complete. It doesn’t include him. And it certainly doesn’t include you swooping in to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.”
“You call living here complete?” The words burst from him, laced with a disdain he couldn’t mask. He waved a hand at her thrift-store furniture, her modest walls. “Hana, you ran the operations for a billion-dollar fund. Now you’re… what? Folding tiny shirts?”
Adam, sensitive to the shift in tone, leaned into Hana’s side. She placed a steadying hand on his back.
“Your proposal,” she said, letting the words sit in the air between them. “Marry you.” She didn’t phrase it as a question. It was a statement of bewildering absurdity. “You think this is a rescue. A noble gesture. You look at my son and you see a predicament you can solve with a signature and a ring.”
“I’m offering you stability. A name. A future.”
“You’re offering pity,” she corrected, her voice cold. “And I don’t need your pity, Xavier. We,” she said, squeezing Adam gently, “are perfectly fine without it. We are perfectly fine without her being Hana again. That woman is gone. She folded your laundry and managed your mistresses and watched you choose someone else. She’s gone.”
Xavier stared at her, his handsome face a map of confusion and bruised ego. His solutions—money, influence, a merger—were failing him here in this sunlit room that smelled of lavender and baby shampoo. The blueprint he’d built in his mind, the one where he redeemed her tragic circumstance, was crumbling.
Adam chose that moment to slip off the sofa. He toddled unsteadily a few paces toward the intriguing stranger, stopping just out of reach. He looked up, his head tilted.
“Mama?” he said, not to Hana, but to Xavier, as if asking for a categorization.
The word, misapplied and innocent, seemed to fracture something in Xavier’s resolve. He looked from the boy’s searching face to Hana’s immutable one. The certainty he’d carried in with him, the investigator’s report, his own deductive logic, all of it evaporated under the mundane reality of a child’s curiosity.
He took a slow step backward, then another. The space he created felt heavy and final.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said, but the conviction was gone from his voice. It sounded hollow, a script he was supposed to read.
“I know my mistakes,” Hana replied, her gaze unwavering. “This isn’t one of them.”
He gave a curt, almost imperceptible nod, a businessman accepting a deal’s collapse. His eyes lingered on Adam for one last, desperate second, as if trying to memorize a code he couldn’t crack. Then he turned and left, closing the door softly behind him, leaving behind only the faint, expensive scent of his cologne and a silence that felt like solid ground.
Hana let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
Hana let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. The familiar click of the door latch was both a closure and an explosion. She listened to his receding footsteps in the hallway, measured and heavy, until they faded into the building’s ambient hum. Adam, sensing the shift, crawled into her lap and pressed his warm head against her sternum, his little body a grounding weight.
Outside, the late afternoon sun felt abrasive against Xavier’s skin. He slid into the driver’s seat of his rented car but didn’t start the engine. He just sat there, his hands resting on the cool leather of the wheel, seeing nothing but the inside of that sunlit apartment. Not the books, or the faded chair, or Hana’s defiant face. Just the boy. Adam.
Those hazel eyes, so exact in their shade to Hana’s, yet brighter, more inquisitive. The stubborn set of his jaw as he’d toddled closer. He kept replaying the moment the child had looked up at him and said “Mama?” The word had arrowed into him, bypassing all logic, leaving a hollow, aching space. It wasn’t paternal instinct; it was something else, a form of longing so acute and unfamiliar it felt like nausea. He wanted to hear that voice again. He wanted to study the map of that face, to find the features that belonged to the phantom father, the man he already hated with a corrosive passion. A fierce, irrational protectiveness twisted in his gut—not for Hana, but for the boy. The feeling was so visceral it scared him.
He finally turned the key, the engine’s purr too smooth, too sanitized for the chaos in his head. He drove without destination, the Kuala Lumpur traffic a blur of color and noise. His proposal echoed in the silence, cringeworthy in its staggering miscalculation. Marry me. He had offered her a business merger to solve a personal tragedy, and she had looked at him as if he were a simpleton. He was supposed to be the solver of problems, the closer of deals. He had laid out the most favorable terms he could conceive—security, legitimacy, his name—and she had rejected them as if they were insults. Which, he was starting to understand, they were.
Back in the apartment, the scent of Xavier’s cologne still hung in the air, a ghost of his intrusion. Hana disentangled herself from Adam and fetched her phone, her fingers cold. She scrolled to James’s number, her throat tight.
He answered on the first ring, his voice tight with anticipation. “Well?”
“He came. He just left.” Her own voice sounded flat, robotic.
“And?”
“And he knows nothing. He’s constructed this entire… fantasy.” A short, jagged laugh escaped her. “He thinks I was attacked. He thinks I’m a victim hiding in shame.”
James was silent for a beat. “Christ.”
“He proposed, James.” The words tasted absurd on her tongue.
A longer silence stretched, thick with disbelief. “Proposed what?”
“Marriage. A ‘solution.’ He would ‘accept the child as his own.’ Bring us back to New York. Fix it.” She could hear the bitter air-quotes in her own tone. “He looked at Adam and saw a corporate liability to be absorbed.”
“Jesus, Xavier,” James muttered, a world of exasperation in the name. Then his tone shifted, becoming pointed, almost sharp. “Hana. Why didn’t you say yes?”
The question hit her like a slap. “What?”
“You heard me. Why didn’t you agree to marry him?” James’s frustration was palpable, crackling down the line. “It solves everything. Legal security for Adam. Financial security for life. No more hiding. Xavier gets to play the hero, which he’s clearly desperate to do, and you get everything you ever wanted.”
She stood up, pacing to the window, her back to the room where her son played. “What I wanted?” Her voice dropped to a fierce whisper. “I wanted him. Not a pity arrangement. Not a business deal to clean up his own fabricated version of my mess. He doesn’t want me. He wants to fix the broken thing he thinks I’ve become.”
“So tell him the truth!” James shot back, his usual calm fraying. “Tell him it was him! That Adam is his! That’s the nuclear option, Hana. He’d have to marry you then, or at least provide for you. The truth would force his hand.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, the chaotic memory of that single, blurred night—his tears, his breath smelling of expensive Scotch, the way he’d called her Lily before collapsing into sleep—flooding her. “No.”
“Why? Because you’re protecting him? Still? After all this?”
“I’m protecting Adam,” she hissed, the force of her conviction steadying her. “From being a regrettable mistake his father made while blackout drunk. From being a secret. From being a responsibility Xavier accepts because a DNA test forces him to. I won’t let my son be someone’s obligation.”
James exhaled, a long, weary sound. “So what’s your play? He’s not just going to drop this. He saw the kid. That changes things for a man like him. It’s a puzzle he can’t solve.”
She watched a neon sign flicker to life across the street, staining the dimming sky a garish red. “I told him the father was a man from that time who didn’t know. That I chose this. That we’re complete without him.”
“And he believed that?”
“He didn’t know what to believe.” She turned from the window, her gaze finding Adam stacking blocks with intense concentration. “But he left. That’s enough for now.”
“For now,” James repeated, skepticism lining the words. “He’s going to dig harder, Hana. Your ‘no’ just confirmed for him that there’s a secret to find. He’ll hire more people, better people. The truth has a way of… seeping out.”
Hana knelt on the rug, gathering Adam into her arms. He squirmed for a moment, then settled, his small hand patting her cheek. “Let him dig,” she said softly, into the phone, her lips brushing her son’s hair. “He’s looking for a monster in the dark. He won’t find one.”
She ended the call, the silence of the apartment settling around her like a shield. But James’s question echoed in the hollows of her mind, a taunt. Why didn’t you agree to marry him? Because the man who proposed today wasn’t the man she had loved. He was a stranger wielding a checkbook and a savior complex, offering to build a life on a foundation of his own profound ignorance. To say yes would have been to bury herself alive in his mistake.
Adam babbled something unintelligible against her neck, a soft, warm secret of his own. She held him tighter, as if the physical act could fuse their stories into a single, unassailable truth. Xavier was out there somewhere, haunted by a face. Let him be haunted. She had the real thing, breathing right here in her arms.