Paused.
But in New York, the Aranda family was not pausing anything.
Sebastian Aranda had become the perfect redeemed husband in public. At charity galas, he stood beside Jimena with one hand on her lower back and spoke warmly about fatherhood. His mother, Rebecca Aranda, gave interviews about legacy, family values, and the future of Aranda Global Holdings. His father, Ernesto, smiled for cameras with the pride of a man who believed the family name had survived its only inconvenience.
That inconvenience was Camila.
To them, she was gone.
Paid.
Silenced.
Erased.
Jimena, meanwhile, had grown comfortable inside the role Camila once occupied. She wore white to foundation luncheons, smiled at board wives, and allowed society magazines to photograph her nursery in the Aranda penthouse. The headline was exactly what Rebecca wanted: “A New Generation for One of America’s Most Powerful Families.”
Sebastian tried to enjoy it.
He told himself he had made the practical choice. He told himself Camila had accepted the money because, deep down, she had wanted freedom too. He told himself Jimena’s pregnancy proved everything had happened for a reason.
But sometimes, late at night, he remembered Camila’s face when she signed the settlement papers. Not broken. Not begging. Calm. Almost distant. As if she had already walked out of his life before her body left the room.
That look haunted him more than tears would have.
The first crack appeared six weeks later.
Rebecca received a call from the family’s private medical consultant. The doctor’s voice was strained, careful, and far too formal. Jimena had undergone additional prenatal testing after a minor complication, and something about the results did not match what had been previously assumed.
Rebecca did not like assumptions.
She liked documents.
“Send me the report,” she said.
When the file arrived, she read it once and felt her stomach tighten. Then she read it again. By the third reading, her hands were cold.
The twins were not twelve weeks behind the affair.
They were older.
Much older.
Rebecca called Sebastian into her office at the Aranda estate in Greenwich, Connecticut. He arrived annoyed, already late for a meeting, but the look on his mother’s face stopped him at the door. Rebecca did not panic. She did not tremble. So when Sebastian saw fear in her eyes, his own confidence began to collapse.
“What happened?” he asked.
Rebecca slid the report across the desk.
Sebastian picked it up, scanned the first page, and frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“You will,” Rebecca said.
By the time he reached the dates, his face had lost color. Jimena’s twins had been conceived before she claimed. Before Sebastian had started seeing her regularly. Before the weekend in Miami when she had told him she was pregnant. Before the night she cried and said he had to choose her because she was carrying his children.
Sebastian shook his head. “This has to be wrong.”
Rebecca’s mouth hardened. “Medical timelines are not gossip.”
“She wouldn’t lie about this.”
Rebecca looked at her son with a bitterness he had never heard from her before. “A woman who sleeps with a married man and accepts a penthouse from him is not exactly allergic to strategy.”
For the first time in years, Sebastian had no answer.
