The sound reached him before the image did.
A laugh—light, unrestrained, unmistakably real.
It sliced through the stillness of the estate like a mistake. Laughter did not belong here. Not in a house where every surface gleamed, where the air smelled of chlorine, designer perfume, and control. Not in a place where silence had long been mistaken for order.
Alexander Montgomery stopped just inside the iron gate, one hand still resting on the cold metal. His meeting had ended early, his head crowded with clauses, acquisitions, and unread messages. For a moment, he honestly thought he had stepped onto the wrong property.
Then the laugh came again.
His chest tightened, as if an invisible thread inside him had been pulled too hard, too suddenly. The leather briefcase slipped from his fingers and fell onto the gravel with a dull crack. He didn’t look down.
He looked forward.
His mind—trained to dissect contracts, to read hesitation in a man’s eyes—needed several long seconds to accept what it was seeing.
On the lawn, beneath the open sky, his son was alive.
Not present. Not compliant. Alive.
Leo.
His Leo.