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He hears something in my voice and pauses.

"It's a start," he says.

"I know it's a lot. But I can give them everything, Blaire. Every opportunity, every door I had and more."

"They already have everything," I say.

"That's not what I—"

"They have a home," I tell him, and my voice rises before I can stop it.

"They have a room they share, a house they know, and friends they've had since they were three. They have a camp they love and a school they're starting in the fall, grandparents in Illinois who call every Sunday, and Erica and Chloe and Hannah. They have a mother who built every single piece of that life by herself." I take a breath.

"And you just walked into my kitchen and replaced all of it in five minutes, with a folder."

"I'm not replacing anything," Ross says.

"I'm trying to give them more."

"You don't get to define more," I tell him.

"You don't get to decide what everything means for them. You didn't even ask me, Ross. You found a house. You called a school. You planned my career for me. You decided all of it, and then you came here to tell me what we're doing. You're deciding first and asking second, again, the same way you did the last time."

His face hardens. For the first time since he walked in, I see anger in it, real anger, the kind he's been holding back for weeks.

"You want to talk about deciding first?" he says. His voice is low and tight.

"You decided everything about their lives for seven years without me! Their names. Where they live. What they were told about their father—which was nothing! You didn't ask me once. You didn't even give me the chance to be asked. So don't stand there and tell me I'm the one who makes decisions without consulting anyone."

The words hit like a slap, and the worst part is that he's right. I know he's right. I've known it for a very long time. But so am I, and I'm too hurt and too angry to give him anything.

"So this is what it's about?" I say.

"You're making up for lost time by taking over the time we have left?"

"That isn't fair," he says.

"None of this is fair!" I say, and then I glance toward the stairs and lower my voice to a furious whisper.

"I kept them from you, and it was wrong. I've said that. I'll keep saying it. But you don't get to punish me for it by turning them into Kensingtons and turning me into a woman who used to be their mother before your family's lawyers arrived."

He stares at me. Neither of us moves. The only sound in the kitchen is the refrigerator humming and my own ragged breathing.

When I speak again, the anger has burned out of my voice, and what's left is the question I've been afraid to ask since the day I found out I was pregnant.

"Is there any version of this," I ask quietly, "where they become Kensingtons and are still allowed to be mine?"

Ross doesn't answer.

I watch the question land. I watch him look down at the open folder on my kitchen table, at the pages about the house and the school and the trusts and the travel schedules, and I watch him see it for the first time the way I've been seeing it all along. None of it is about money. None of it is even about London. Every page in that folder is a decision he made about my children and my life without me in the room, and every one of them came with the unspoken assumption that his family's power would simply absorb everything it touched, because that's what it has always done.

He closes the folder slowly, as though it weighs more than it did when he carried it in.

"I came here to protect them from everything out there," he says finally, and his voice is barely above a whisper.

"The press. The photographers. The strangers." He looks at me, and there's something in his eyes I've never seen before, something that looks almost like fear.

"It never occurred to me that I might need to protect them from me."