The Man My Son Called Daddy

While shopping with her three-year-old son Ian, a mother hears him call a stranger "Daddy." The man turns out to be Sebastian Knight, the heir she left three years ago. She pulls Ian close, calls Sebastian a stranger, and hurries home, though Ian insists the man stared at him as if he knew him. That night a friend request from Sebastian arrives, and she neither accepts nor refuses it.

Memory carries her back: Sebastian's early gentleness, the chestnut cake, the tilted umbrella, and the chasm between his world of drivers and private chefs and her rented flat and subway commute. At a party, his childhood friend Victoria hints that she and a colleague named Jonathan were once close. Sebastian says nothing, then lets doubt take root, growing colder, timing her replies, and asking whether she stayed silent out of guilt.

On his birthday, she spends a month's salary on a watch he once wanted, unaware that the worst is still ahead.