He stepped out of his Tesla and saw his college sweetheart begging on the freezing pavement… But when he looked at the three shivering children clinging to her, he realized he wasn’t just looking at strangers. Full story in the comments.
The Chicago wind cut through the streets like a serrated knife, but Mason Wilder didn’t feel it. Inside his custom-tailored cashmere coat, he was insulated from the world. At 35, he was the face of WilderTech, a billionaire who had traded his personal life for a spot on the Forbes list. He checked his Rolex—he was ten minutes early for the merger meeting that would cement his legacy.
He signaled his driver to stop. “I’ll walk the last block,” he said, needing to clear his head.
He stepped onto the sidewalk, the slush crunching beneath his Italian leather oxfords. He was scrolling through a spreadsheet on his phone when a splash of color caught his peripheral vision. A red mitten, worn and unraveling, waving weakly from a huddled mass against the brick wall of a bank.
A woman sat there on a piece of damp cardboard. Her coat was three sizes too big, stained with grime. Three small children were piled around her like puppies, trying to share body heat.
Mason usually walked past without looking. It was a defense mechanism of the city. But something about the woman’s profile—the curve of her jaw, the way a loose strand of chestnut hair fell over her cheek—made his feet stop dead.
He stood there, frozen, as the pedestrian traffic flowed around him like water around a stone.
The woman looked up. Her eyes were hollow, rimmed with red, but the color… that striking, unusual amber.
“Taryn?” the name scratched out of his throat, foreign and familiar all at once.
Her eyes widened in panic. She grabbed the blanket, trying to pull it higher over her face, shame flooding her features. “No, please… don’t look.”
It had been seven years. Seven years since he stood in their college apartment and told her that she was holding him back. That he needed to move to Seattle alone to build his empire. He had promised to call. He never did.
Mason dropped to his knees, ignoring the slush soaking into his suit pants. “Taryn, my god. What happened?”
“Life happened, Mason,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “Go away. Please. You made your choice.”
But Mason couldn’t move. Because the blanket had slipped.
Three pairs of eyes were staring at him. Three faces that were like looking into a mirror from thirty years ago.
They were triplets. Two boys and a girl. They looked to be about six years old. They had his square chin. They had the Wilder nose. And they had the same dark, brooding eyes that stared back at him from magazine covers.
The timeline hit him like a physical blow. Seven years ago he left.
“Taryn,” Mason breathed, the air turning into white puffs between them. He pointed a trembling hand toward the boy nearest to him. “How old are they?”
Taryn looked down, defeat slumping her shoulders. She pulled the boy closer, rubbing his freezing back. “They turned six last month.”
“Six,” Mason repeated. The math was undeniable. “They’re… mine?”
Taryn didn’t answer with words. She just looked at him, tears cutting clean tracks through the dirt on her face. “I found out two weeks after you left for Seattle. I called you, Mason. I called you ten times. You changed your number.”
The memory of his assistant telling him he had “nuisance calls” from his old life flashed through his mind. He had told her to block them. He had been so busy building the future, he hadn’t realized he had destroyed his past.
“My parents disowned me for keeping them,” Taryn continued, her voice devoid of hope. “I worked three jobs. But then the factory closed. Then the sickness came. We lost the apartment two months ago.”
One of the boys coughed—a wet, rattling sound that terrified Mason.
“He has pneumonia,” Taryn sobbed quietly. “I’m trying to get him into a shelter, but they’re full. I’m just trying to keep him warm.”
Mason felt a crack in his chest, a fissure that shattered the cold, hard exterior he had built over a decade. He looked at the billions in his bank account, the merger awaiting him, the Tesla idling at the corner. It was all ash. It was all dust.
He stood up abruptly. Taryn flinched, expecting him to walk away.
Instead, Mason tore off his $5,000 coat and draped it over the coughing boy and his sister. He ripped off his scarf and wrapped it around Taryn.
“Get up,” Mason commanded, his voice thick with emotion.
“Mason, we can’t go with you, look at us,” she cried.
“I said get up!” He reached down, not with the arrogance of a CEO, but with the desperation of a father. He pulled Taryn to her feet. He scooped up the sick boy in his arms, holding him tight against his silk shirt.
“Where are we going?” the little girl asked, her teeth chattering.
Mason looked at the child—his daughter. He saw his own mother in her face. Tears blurred his vision, hot and fast.
“Home,” Mason choked out. “We’re going home.”
He walked them to the car, ignoring the stares of the passersby, ignoring the buzzing of his phone as he missed the biggest meeting of his career. He buckled them into the leather seats of the Tesla, cranking the heat up as high as it would go.
“Driver,” Mason said, looking at Taryn in the rearview mirror as she wept silently, holding the hands of the children he never knew he had.
“To the meeting, sir?” the driver asked.
“No,” Mason said, taking Taryn’s hand across the console. “Take us to the hospital first. Then to the penthouse. And cancel everything on my calendar. Indefinitely.”
He had spent seven years building a fortune, thinking he had everything. But as he looked at the three sleeping faces thawing out in the backseat of his car, Mason Wilder realized he had been the poorest man in the world until five minutes ago.
