He looked at his child—the child who looked so much like him—and saw Lexi’s features in his face, too; he had her perfectly arched brows in a dark golden blond, and fuller lips, and a slightly upturned nose. Qualities that Theo had admired in her, spotting her at a cocktail party that year after he came home, thinking that—that he probably should get married, after all, even though...

Even though.

The divorce had been friendly as well as businesslike, the perhaps inevitable conclusion to a marriage which was more a transaction than a love affair. They’d both wanted a child, and they had worked efficiently enough together to make one. Alexia was everything he could have wanted in a wife—graceful, elegant, refined, and wickedly funny—and they’d been good friends, and Jasper had had a loving childhood with two parents who truly liked each other. And she had offered a sort of arrangement, but he couldn’t let himself—

She had been right, to ask for the divorce. To let Jasper grow up a little, but then to let him see two parents who were—

Happier.

Maybe.

So Lexi moved back to New York when the papers were signed, when Jasper got his welcome letter from Gwynns, and he went up for weekends of shopping and theatre, and he was okay with it all, a mom in a high-rise with a glamourous life and a dad in the family home with his grand-mère.

And now he was where he was meant to be, here at Gwynns, starting his own life.

Theo would try not to miss him.

“S’cuse me.” A polite—if ill-spoken—voice behind him.

He turned.

Memories hit him right in the chest, numerous and nebulous and wretched. The room reeled—for a brief moment he was worried that he would fall over. He grasped at a desk chair, subtly, just in case.

A thin, black-haired boy stood in the hall. He had blue eyes, a smattering of freckles across his nose, and a stuffed duffel bag. His hair was more textured, his skin just a shade darker, but he looked almost exactly the same as—

Theo felt his thirty-seven years hanging around his neck like a noose.

Twenty of those years in particular.

“Hi!” This from Jasper, and Theo took a deep breath and shut his inappropriately gaping mouth.

“Hey.” The other boy walked in, slung down his last duffel, and held out his hand.

Jasper took it with a broad smile.

Already friendly.

Oh, God.

They looked—they looked so young. He had never felt like that, and a part of him was still convinced that he had somehow been older, all those years ago, when he first came to Gwynns. Jasper was still so fresh, untested. And Theo—when he moved in, he had already felt weary, desperate to prove something that he probably never would.