His expression changed.
Anger shifted into something else, something like shock, like recognition trying to fight its way to the surface.
He stared at the girls’ faces, at their black hair, their deep brown eyes.
Then, without hesitation, Lucas took off his expensive suit jacket and draped it around both girls.
The fabric was warm. Heavy. Real. It wrapped them like shelter.
Catherine’s breath caught because kindness felt unfamiliar, like a language she’d almost forgotten.
Lucas knelt so he was level with them. “What are your names?” he asked gently.
Catherine’s throat tightened. No one had asked that in a way that sounded like it mattered.
Christine whispered, “I’m Christine. This is Catherine.”
Lucas repeated softly, “Christine and Catherine.”
His eyes searched their faces as if looking for a missing piece of himself.
“How old are you?”
“Ten,” Catherine managed. “We’re twins.”
“And your parents?” Lucas asked, voice careful. “Where do you live?”
The hardest question in the world.
Catherine swallowed. “We don’t have parents anymore,” she said. “We… we don’t live anywhere.”
Lucas’s jaw tightened, grief flaring behind his eyes. “What was your mother’s name?”
Catherine hesitated, then said it anyway, because it was the one truth she had left.
“Helen Harper.”
Lucas went still.
It was as if the name had punched the air from his lungs.
“Helen,” he whispered, voice breaking. “Oh God… Helen.”
His hands shook.
Catherine stared. “How do you know her?”
Lucas’s eyes filled with tears, and the sight of this powerful man crying in front of hundreds of people made Catherine’s world tilt.
“I knew your mother,” he whispered. “She was… she was the love of my life.”
The words fell onto the stage and shattered everything that had been true a moment ago.
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