“Then let them burn it down to the bedrock,” Dominic said, turning his back on his parents.
He walked slowly toward me, stopping exactly three feet away. He didn’t reach for Lily. He didn’t presume he had the right to touch her. Instead, he looked at me with an expression completely stripped of pride, wealth, or corporate armor. There was only raw, unadulterated regret left in his gray-blue eyes.
“I cannot erase the nights you spent alone in that apartment, Audrey,” he whispered, his voice catching in his throat. “I cannot buy back the four months I missed of her life. I won’t even ask you to forgive me today, because I haven’t earned a single fraction of it.”
He looked down at Lily’s tiny face. She opened her eyes, let out a soft, contented coo, and reached her small hand out into the air. Dominic slowly held out his index finger, his hand shaking violently, until her tiny fingers curled tightly around it.
