I looked away and walked over to Felix as if nothing was wrong, my tone light but deliberately pausing on his last name.
"Felix... Foster? Mind scooting over?"
The atmosphere grew even quieter after I spoke, so quiet you could hear everyone breathing. Someone even gasped audibly.

They were clearly shocked. This kind of shock would spread through the company fast. After all, everyone loved gossip and drama.
I was just curious about Jenna. She'd told me I should understand how the world works. I wondered if she'd reached her peak yet.
Afterward, I didn't bother looking at her again. When the party ended, she followed a pale-faced Felix to say goodbye to my mother. Her voice was low, seemingly laced with suppressed anger.
I sat in the car without speaking while Mom gave her and Felix a meaningful look before smiling and saying goodbye. Once they left, the smile faded from her eyes as she turned to me. "You two broke up?"
She knew about Jenna. When I first joined the company, I'd mentioned her. My mother could have guessed the nature of our relationship.
I shifted my gaze from the car window to her face. Time seemed to favor her. She was as beautiful as ever, her presence even more refined now.

"Didn't you see her with Felix? He and his father both like taking other men's women."
My tone betrayed no emotion, but the words cut sharp.
"Mom."
I hadn't called her "Mom" in a very long time. Not since she divorced my father.

I was young back then and never understood why my parents divorced. But slowly, I figured it out.
Felix's father was Mom's first love. They dated in school.
But when he found out Mom came from a poor family and wasn't good enough for him, he dumped her and married someone else.
Dad, on the other hand, grew up with Mom. Childhood friends. He waited for her for years before they finally got together.
This company was something Dad built alongside Mom. Mom became successful with a happy family, but it was all surface-level. She was ambitious and harbored resentment toward her first love for dumping her.
Sometimes hatred was just another form of feeling. Over time, maybe something subtle shifted. In the end, my parents divorced. Then Mom got together with Felix's father, Fabian Foster.
But they never married. Mom just supported them financially, visiting when she felt like it to mock Fabian for the way he'd thrown her aside all those years ago.
Felix's original surname was Roche, but he and his father both changed their surnames to Foster to please my mother.
Father and son displayed their opportunism perfectly. They didn't know about me, but I knew about them.
That was because Mom brought them home behind Dad's back. They ate together, watched TV together, and played around together like a happy family of three.
Then one day I skipped class and snuck home, only to walk in on exactly that scene. I was furious, so I played a prank on Felix that left his hand burned. They never found out it was me, though.
That scar on his hand was how I recognized him as the person in Jenna's wallpaper photo. Jenna only knew that my parents were divorced and that I lived with my father.
After graduation, Mom told me to work at her company. She said I was her biological son and that the company and everything else would be mine eventually.