Grayson Holt had come to the wedding prepared to hate everything.
The bells over Fifth Avenue were too bright, too loud, too certain.
They rang across the afternoon like the whole city had decided love was still worth celebrating, and Grayson resented them for it.
He resented the white roses pouring over every archway.
He resented the soft smell of perfume and candle wax inside St. Adrian’s Cathedral.
He resented the string quartet playing the kind of music that made people lower their voices and remember who they used to be.
Most of all, he resented the empty seat beside him.
It was a ridiculous thing for a man like him to notice.
Grayson Holt was thirty-four years old and rich enough that strangers called his life inspiring when what they really meant was unreachable.
He owned towers, companies, private planes, and a penthouse with glass walls overlooking Manhattan.
He had sat across from bankers who thought they could corner him.
He had survived scandals arranged by men who smiled at charity dinners.
He had built Holt & Aster Holdings into the kind of name people said carefully.
But that empty seat beside him kept pulling his eyes like a wound under a bandage.
Two years earlier, that seat would have belonged to Samara Brooks.
Two years earlier, she would have leaned toward him during the vows and whispered something dry about how Ethan looked terrified.
Two years earlier, he would have pretended not to smile.
Two years earlier, he had still believed there would be time to fix what he had been too proud to name.
Time is the lie proud people tell themselves when an apology feels too small for the damage.
By the time they understand the truth, the door has usually already closed.
Samara had closed it quietly.
That was the part that still haunted him.
She had not screamed.
She had not thrown anything.
She had packed one suitcase in his bedroom while rain ran down the penthouse windows and his phone lit up every few seconds with messages from the Tokyo office.
He remembered the sound of the zipper.
He remembered the way she paused near the elevator, waiting for him to say something worth staying for.
He had said the wrong thing instead.
He had said she was being dramatic.
He had said they could talk when his week settled down.
He had said, in that calm executive tone he used when he wanted to sound reasonable and untouchable, that she needed to stop turning every disappointment into a crisis.
Samara had looked at him for a long second.
Then she had nodded once.
“You really don’t hear yourself anymore,” she had said.
That was the last full sentence she had ever given him.
Now he sat in the front pew while his childhood friend Ethan Walker married Claire Davenport under a ceiling painted with angels.
Ethan was crying before Claire even reached the altar.
The guests laughed softly at that.
Claire squeezed his hands.
The priest smiled.
Phones rose.
A woman behind Grayson whispered, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Grayson gave the sort of smile people accepted from rich men because no one expected them to mean anything deeply.
Beautiful things were dangerous.
They showed you what you had ruined before you had the decency to forget it.
The program on his lap said Saturday, 4:00 PM.
At 3:42 PM, his assistant had texted that the Chicago real estate closing was complete.
The final wire had cleared at 2:17 PM.
Legal had uploaded the signed transfer packet into the Holt & Aster Holdings board archive under WACKER RESTRUCTURE — FINAL.
The deal would be in the business pages by Monday.
There would be emails.
There would be congratulations.
There would be another week of people saying he had done the impossible again.
Grayson looked at the empty seat beside him and felt nothing like a winner.
After the vows, the reception moved to the ballroom of the Langford Hotel.
The hotel had polished marble floors, crystal chandeliers, white roses in tall vases, and windows high enough to make Manhattan look staged.
The city glittered outside as if it had never heard of regret.
Grayson gave the toast Ethan had asked for.
He did it well because Grayson did most public things well.
He spoke about loyalty.
He spoke about finding the person who makes ambition feel less lonely.
He made one joke about Ethan losing his keys in college and nearly missing a final.
People laughed when he wanted them to.
Claire wiped her eyes.
Ethan hugged him afterward and said, “Thanks, Gray. Means a lot.”
Grayson nodded.
His chest felt hollow, but nobody in the room had paid enough to see inside him.
He made it to the bar before the first dance.
“Whiskey. Neat.”
The bartender glanced at his face, then wisely glanced away.
At weddings, people let sorrow dress itself as sophistication.
Grayson carried the glass to the balcony.
Outside, the evening air was cool against his skin.
Taxis crawled below like yellow sparks.
A saxophone played somewhere near the corner.
The drink smelled like smoke and oak.
His phone buzzed again.
Another message about Chicago.
Another person telling him congratulations.
Another reminder that he had won something he did not want to go home and celebrate alone.
“Cheer up,” Ethan said behind him.
Grayson turned.
His friend stood in the balcony doorway with his tux jacket open and his wedding band catching the hotel light.
“You’re supposed to be dancing with your wife,” Grayson said.
“I was,” Ethan said. “She sent me to check on you.”
“Tell her I’m alive.”
“You look like you’re attending your own sentencing.”
Grayson looked back over the railing.
“That obvious?”
“Only to people who know you.”
“Then stop knowing me.”
Ethan came to the railing and leaned beside him.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
They had known each other since prep school.
Ethan had seen Grayson before the money became mythology, before the suits became armor, before every room treated him like either a prize or a threat.
That kind of friendship was inconvenient because it remembered too much.
“Is this about Samara?” Ethan asked.
The name wrapped around Grayson’s throat.
“Don’t.”
“You loved her.”
“I said don’t.”
“And you never told her well enough.”
Grayson turned his head sharply.
“Enjoy your wedding, Ethan.”
Ethan raised his hands, but he did not retreat.
“Fine,” he said. “But one day you’re going to have to stop acting like being hurt gives you permission to stay angry forever.”
Grayson almost answered.
He almost said Ethan did not understand.
He almost said Samara had left him, not the other way around.
He almost said a hundred things that would have sounded true only because they were arranged in the right order.
Then the sound came from inside the ballroom.
It was not cheering.
It was not laughter.
It was the sound of a room losing its breath.
A hush moved through the reception so quickly that both men turned before either knew why.
Ethan straightened.
“What the hell?”
Grayson stepped through the balcony doors.
The ballroom had frozen.
Forks hovered above plates.
Champagne glasses paused halfway to mouths.
A bridesmaid stopped mid-laugh.
One waiter stood near the center aisle with a tray balanced in both hands, eyes fixed on the entrance.
The chandelier light kept sparkling over the marble.
The string quartet kept playing for two more uncertain notes.
Then even the music stumbled quiet.
At the entrance stood Samara Brooks.
Grayson’s mind rejected her first.
It made her a memory.
It made her a trick of whiskey, chandeliers, and punishment.
But she was not a memory.
She was real.
Her dark curls were pinned back with a pearl clip.
Her deep blue dress was simple and elegant, falling around her in soft lines.
She looked older than the woman who had walked out of his penthouse two years ago, but not diminished.
There was a steadiness in her now that did not ask anyone for permission.
And in her arms were two babies.
One on each hip.
For a moment, Grayson did not understand what he was seeing.
The boy wore a tiny navy suit.
The girl wore a cream dress with a satin bow.
Her small hand was curled around Samara’s necklace.
They looked no more than a year old.
The glass slipped from Grayson’s hand.
It struck the carpet with a dull sound.
The baby boy turned his head.
Gray eyes.
Not blue.
Not hazel.
Gray.
Grayson’s gray.
The little girl blinked, and the shape of her nose, the tiny serious crease between her brows, struck him with such force that he almost reached for the wall.
His mother had kept a baby picture of him in the hallway of the Holt estate.
That same crease had been on his infant face.
The room blurred at the edges.
No.
Samara gave polite, nervous smiles to people who approached her.
Claire’s aunt touched the baby girl’s sleeve.
Someone whispered, “Are those hers?”
Another voice said, “I didn’t even know she had children.”
At 7:18 PM, every deal Grayson had ever closed became meaningless.
No signed transfer packet could explain this.
No board approval could rearrange the facts.
No money could make the boy’s eyes belong to somebody else.
Then Samara saw him.
She froze.
Everything between them happened without a word.
Shock.
Pain.
Accusation.
Fear.
And beneath all of it, something that had survived their worst selves.
Ethan stepped up beside Grayson.
His wedding smile had vanished.
“Gray,” he whispered, staring at the twins. “Are those yours?”
The question did not travel loudly.
It did not need to.
Grayson heard it in every silent face in the ballroom.
Samara tightened her hold on the children.
The little girl made a small unhappy sound against her shoulder.
Claire set her bouquet down on the sweetheart table and came forward slowly.
“Samara,” she said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
Samara’s eyes flicked to Claire, and for the first time, Grayson saw the exhaustion under her composure.
“I almost didn’t,” she said.
Her voice was the same.
Lower, maybe.
Tired, certainly.
But it was the same voice that had once read contracts beside him at midnight, corrected his terrible coffee order, and told him the truth when everyone else in his life was paid not to.
Grayson took one step forward.
Samara took one step back.
That stopped him more effectively than a shouted warning could have.
“Samara,” he said.
The sound of her name in his mouth changed the room.
He had said it so many ways before.
Carelessly.
Tenderly.
Angrily.
Not enough.
Now it sounded like a man asking permission to approach the wreckage he had helped create.
The baby boy reached toward the floor, and Samara shifted him on her hip.
That was when Grayson saw the diaper bag strap sliding down her shoulder.
Tucked under the strap was a small plastic hospital band.
Old.
Saved.
Not something a person carried by accident.
He saw part of a printed line.
The letters were half hidden, but he saw enough.
HOLT.
His body went cold.
Ethan saw it too.
Claire covered her mouth.
Samara noticed where his eyes had gone, and the strength drained from her face for one second before she pulled herself back together.
That one second told Grayson more than a confession would have.
She had carried proof because she had learned proof was safer than trust.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Grayson asked.
He hated the question the moment it left his mouth.
It sounded too clean.
Too injured.
Too much like he was the wronged person in a story he had not even had the courage to read.
Samara looked at him for a long moment.
Her eyes filled, but she did not cry.
The baby girl tugged at her necklace again.
The baby boy stared at Grayson with impossible gray eyes.
Then Samara said quietly, “I did.”
The room seemed to move without moving.
Grayson shook his head once.
“What?”
“I did,” Samara repeated. “Twice.”
The word twice landed harder than any accusation.
A murmur moved through the ballroom.
Ethan turned toward Grayson, confused now, not accusing yet but close.
“Gray?”
Samara reached into the diaper bag with one careful hand while balancing both babies against her body.
Claire moved instinctively to help, but Samara gave a tiny shake of her head.
She pulled out a folded envelope.
It had been opened and closed so many times that the edge was soft.
The front had Grayson’s name written in Samara’s handwriting.
Not a lawyer’s office.
Not an assistant.
His name.
Grayson recognized the handwriting immediately.
He had once watched that same hand mark up one of his speeches because, as she put it, he sounded like a beautiful robot pretending to have a pulse.
Samara held out the envelope.
“I sent this to your penthouse first,” she said. “Then to your office.”
He did not take it fast enough.
Ethan did.
Not to read it.
Just to keep it from falling.
Samara’s fingers were trembling now.
“Your assistant said you were unavailable,” she continued. “Your legal office sent back a message saying all personal claims should go through counsel.”
Grayson stared at her.
The words did not fit inside him.
His assistant.
His legal office.
His walls.
All the systems he had built to keep chaos away had kept away the only thing that mattered.
“I never saw it,” he said.
Samara’s laugh was small and broken.
“That was the point, wasn’t it?”
He flinched.
Because two years ago, he had taught her exactly that.
He had taught her that access to him could be revoked when she became inconvenient.
He had taught her that his silence was a locked door.
And then he had acted surprised when she stopped knocking.
Ethan unfolded the envelope enough to see the top page.
His face changed.
“Gray,” he said softly.
Claire whispered, “What is it?”
Ethan looked at Samara first, asking permission without words.
She gave the smallest nod.
He turned the page toward Grayson.
It was a clinic intake form.
Samara Brooks.
Twin pregnancy.
Date stamped nearly nineteen months earlier.
Emergency contact line crossed out, rewritten, then crossed out again.
Father information requested.
Grayson Holt.
The letters swam in front of him.
He remembered that month.
He had been in London for a capital summit.
Then Chicago.
Then Los Angeles.
He had ignored three unknown numbers because unknown numbers never brought anything he wanted.
He had told his assistant to filter all personal disruptions.
Personal disruptions.
His children had been filed under disruptions.
The baby boy fussed, and Samara kissed the top of his head.
That small act, tender and practiced, nearly undid him.
“Their names,” Grayson said.
Samara’s lips pressed together.
For a moment, he thought she might refuse him even that.
He would have deserved it.
“Noah,” she said, shifting the boy slightly. “And Emma.”
American names.
Simple names.
Names that sounded like lunchboxes, school forms, scraped knees, bedtime stories, and every ordinary thing Grayson had never imagined belonging to him.
Noah looked at him again.
Emma tucked her face against Samara’s shoulder.
Grayson’s eyes burned.
He did not reach for them.
That restraint cost him something.
Every instinct in him wanted to close the distance, to touch a hand, a cheek, a sleeve, to prove with contact that this was real.
But Samara had stepped back when he moved forward.
He would not make her step back again.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
Samara’s face tightened.
“I know you didn’t.”
That answer confused him more than anger would have.
“Then why do you look at me like that?”
“Because not knowing does not make you innocent,” she said.
The sentence landed cleanly.
Nobody in the ballroom spoke.
The chandelier hummed faintly above them.
Somewhere near the kitchen doors, a server lowered a tray until it rested against her hip.
Samara looked around then, as if suddenly remembering they were standing in the middle of someone else’s wedding.
Her cheeks flushed.
“I shouldn’t have come in like this,” she said to Claire. “I’m sorry. I got your invitation late, and I thought maybe I could just congratulate you and leave.”
Claire stepped closer.
“You don’t need to apologize to me.”
Ethan nodded once.
“Not for this.”
Grayson looked at his oldest friend and saw, for the first time that night, the line Ethan was drawing.
Not between himself and Samara.
Between Grayson and the man Grayson had been.
That was fair.
It still hurt.
Samara adjusted the diaper bag.
“I should go.”
The panic that moved through Grayson then was not corporate, not strategic, not polished.
It was animal.
“Please don’t.”
The words came out rough.
Samara went still.
Grayson swallowed.
He could feel dozens of people watching him, but for once the audience did not matter.
His reputation did not matter.
The Monday headlines did not matter.
Only the woman in front of him mattered.
Only the two small lives in her arms mattered.
“I don’t know how to do this right in front of a ballroom full of people,” he said. “But I know I did it wrong before.”
Samara’s expression shifted.
Not softened.
Not yet.
But something in her heard him.
“Grayson,” she said, and his name sounded exhausted in her mouth. “This is not a speech you can give your way out of.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He looked at Noah.
Then at Emma.
Then back at her.
“No,” he admitted. “But I want to.”
For a man who had made a career out of certainty, the truth felt strangely like standing barefoot on broken glass.
Samara blinked quickly.
Claire touched Ethan’s sleeve, and the two of them quietly began guiding nearby guests away, murmuring that dinner would continue in a few minutes.
It was kind.
It was also impossible.
A secret that large could not be folded back into polite conversation.
Still, people moved.
Some because Claire asked.
Some because Ethan looked at them with the calm warning of a groom whose wedding had just become something else entirely.
A smaller circle remained.
Grayson.
Samara.
The twins.
Ethan.
Claire.
The envelope.
All the evidence in the world could not tell Grayson what to say next.
So he asked the only question that did not sound like defense.
“What do they need?”
Samara looked surprised.
It was not the question she expected.
Maybe she expected money.
Maybe she expected a demand.
Maybe she expected him to say lawyer, custody, arrangements, schedule, all the words men like him used when they wanted to turn heartbreak into paperwork.
She glanced down at Emma, then Noah.
“Stability,” she said. “Quiet. Time. And a father who doesn’t disappear the second it gets hard.”
Grayson nodded.
He deserved every word.
“Then I start there.”
Samara studied him.
Two years of history stood between them like a locked hallway.
So did two children.
So did every unanswered call, every returned message, every night she had carried a pregnancy alone while his world kept praising him for being unreachable.
“You don’t get to walk in and claim them because they look like you,” she said.
“I know.”
“You don’t get to punish me for protecting them.”
“I won’t.”
“And you do not get to turn them into some Holt family announcement.”
That one hit something deep in him.
He thought of his father.
He thought of family portraits arranged like acquisitions.
He thought of a childhood in rooms where love was measured by compliance.
“No,” he said. “Never.”
Samara’s shoulders dropped a fraction.
It was not forgiveness.
It was only the smallest reduction in her need to brace.
For Grayson, it felt enormous.
Noah reached toward the fallen glass on the carpet.
Grayson saw it and moved carefully, crouching to pick it up before the child could wiggle down.
He did not step closer to Samara.
He simply removed the danger.
It was the first useful thing he had done all night.
When he stood, Samara was watching him.
Not warmly.
But watching.
“I have a car downstairs,” she said.
The sentence frightened him because it sounded like an ending.
“Let me walk you out,” he said.
She shook her head.
“No.”
He accepted it.
That mattered too.
Then Ethan spoke.
“Samara, wait.”
Everyone turned.
Ethan held up the envelope, not dramatically, not like a man making a scene, but like someone who had just found the hinge on which the whole room turned.
“There’s another page in here,” he said.
Samara went pale.
“Ethan.”
Grayson looked from Ethan to her.
“What page?”
Samara closed her eyes for one second.
When she opened them, the strength was back, but grief sat underneath it.
“The hospital called you the night Emma stopped breathing,” she said.
The words emptied the room.
Grayson stared at her.
“What?”
“She was six weeks old,” Samara said. “It was a breathing episode. She’s fine now. But that night, I panicked. I gave them your number because I thought maybe if it was an emergency, someone would let the call through.”
Grayson felt the blood leave his face.
“I never got a call.”
“I know.”
Ethan’s jaw tightened.
Claire whispered, “Oh my God.”
Grayson looked at the page Ethan held.
It was a hospital contact log.
Date.
Time.
Number dialed.
Outcome.
Message left with office answering service.
The timestamp read 1:43 AM.
Grayson remembered that night too.
He had slept on his jet between meetings.
His phone had been on airplane mode.
His staff had sorted everything by urgency.
A six-week-old child struggling to breathe had been sorted somewhere beneath him.
He covered his mouth with his hand.
For the first time in years, Grayson Holt looked exactly as powerless as he was.
Not because he had lost money.
Not because he had lost status.
Because he had lost the right to say he simply did not know.
Samara stepped back again, but this time it was not fear.
It was boundary.
“I came tonight because Claire was kind to me once when I had nobody else in this city,” she said. “I was not trying to ambush you. I was not trying to collect anything from you. I just wanted to stand in a room I used to belong to and prove to myself I could survive it.”
Her voice cracked on the last word.
Emma began to cry.
Not loudly.
Just enough to bring Samara’s focus back where it always went first.
She kissed her daughter’s cheek.
Noah rested his head against her shoulder.
There was the answer to everything Grayson had not asked.
She had built a life without him because she had to.
Not bitterly.
Not theatrically.
Practically.
With diaper bags, late-night clinics, saved hospital bands, unanswered messages, and two babies who reached for her like she was the whole map of the world.
Grayson stepped aside.
The movement surprised Samara.
It surprised him too.
Every old instinct told him to block the exit, demand the conversation, call someone, fix something, own the room again.
But his children did not need a man who could own rooms.
They needed one who could stop taking up all the air in them.
“I won’t stop you,” he said. “But I’m asking for the chance to show up now. Not with lawyers first. Not with announcements. With whatever you decide is safe for them.”
Samara looked at him for a long time.
The ballroom waited, but more gently now.
Even the guests pretending not to listen seemed to understand that something fragile had replaced the spectacle.
“Tomorrow,” she said finally.
One word.
Grayson nearly closed his eyes.
“Tomorrow?”
“There’s a coffee shop near my building,” she said. “Public. Quiet. You can meet them there for twenty minutes. If you’re late, if you bring a lawyer, if I see one photographer, it ends.”
“I’ll be there.”
“I’m not finished.”
He nodded.
Samara adjusted Emma against her shoulder.
“You don’t hold them unless they reach for you. You don’t make promises in front of them that you have not earned. And you do not call yourself their father until they know what that word feels like with you in it.”
Grayson’s throat tightened.
“Okay.”
It was not enough.
It was the first honest enough word he had.
Samara turned to Claire.
“I’m sorry about your reception.”
Claire shook her head, crying now.
“Don’t be.”
Ethan touched Grayson’s shoulder once.
It was not comfort.
It was instruction.
Do not waste this.
Samara walked toward the exit with Noah and Emma in her arms.
No one stopped her.
Grayson watched every step.
At the doorway, Noah lifted his head and looked back.
For one suspended second, father and son stared at each other across the ballroom.
Then Samara disappeared into the hotel hallway.
The room breathed again, but Grayson did not.
He stood beside the fallen shape of his old life and understood that every prize he had been chasing had trained him for the wrong finish line.
He had won deals.
He had lost doors.
The next morning, he arrived at the coffee shop twenty-eight minutes early.
He came alone.
No driver at the curb.
No assistant.
No lawyer.
No security detail hovering near the pastry case.
Just Grayson in a plain dark coat, sitting at a corner table with both hands wrapped around a paper coffee cup he had not touched.
At 9:03 AM, Samara walked in with the twins.
Noah saw him first.
Emma hid her face.
Samara noticed the empty chair across from him, the untouched coffee, the way he stood but did not move toward them.
Something in her expression eased by the smallest amount.
It was not forgiveness.
It was not love restored.
It was the beginning of a test.
For twenty minutes, Grayson did not talk about custody.
He did not talk about money.
He did not talk about what he had missed as if grief could be billed and reimbursed.
He listened.
He learned that Noah hated peas but loved blueberries.
He learned Emma slept better with one sock off.
He learned Samara worked from home when she could and still kept a folder with every medical form because motherhood had taught her to trust records more than promises.
When Noah dropped a plastic spoon, Grayson picked it up and handed it to Samara instead of reaching over her.
When Emma stared at him, he smiled softly and looked away first so she would not feel cornered.
When the twenty minutes ended, he stood back and let them leave.
That became the first day.
Not the ending.
Not the miracle.
The first day.
In the weeks that followed, Grayson learned that showing up was not a grand gesture.
It was being on time.
It was putting his phone face down.
It was knowing the difference between Emma’s tired cry and Noah’s hungry one.
It was sitting in a pediatric waiting room without asking anyone to clear his schedule because his schedule was no longer the most important thing in the room.
It was hearing Samara say, “Not today,” and respecting it.
It was understanding that money could buy comfort, but it could not buy trust back from a woman who had learned to carry two babies and a whole life without him.
Months later, Claire told him that the wedding had not been ruined.
“It became honest,” she said.
Ethan was less poetic.
“You got handed your soul in front of two hundred people,” he said. “Try not to fumble it.”
Grayson did not.
Not perfectly.
Perfect was another lie he had spent too many years selling.
But he came.
He came to the park.
He came to doctor visits when Samara allowed it.
He came to birthday planning and brought napkins because Samara told him nobody needed a billionaire solution to a toddler party.
He learned to stand on the front porch of Samara’s building with a diaper bag over one shoulder and no idea how to make anyone admire him for it.
That was good for him.
Samara did not make it easy.
She should not have had to.
Some days she was sharp.
Some days she was quiet.
Some days she looked at him and saw the man who had failed her before she could see the man trying not to.
Grayson learned to survive that look without defending himself.
Love does not always return as romance.
Sometimes it returns first as reliability, one kept promise at a time.
A year after the wedding, Noah reached for him.
It happened in Samara’s apartment hallway on an ordinary rainy afternoon.
Grayson had arrived with groceries because Noah had a fever and Samara had been awake most of the night.
Emma was on Samara’s hip.
Noah sat on the floor in dinosaur pajamas, flushed and cranky.
Grayson crouched down, held out a small stuffed bear, and waited.
Noah looked at the bear.
Then at him.
Then he lifted both arms.
Grayson did not move for a second because he was afraid to make the moment vanish.
Samara whispered, “Go ahead.”
So he picked up his son.
Noah’s forehead was warm against his neck.
His small fingers curled into Grayson’s shirt.
Across the hallway, Samara watched with tears in her eyes.
They were not the tears from the wedding.
These were quieter.
Less lonely.
Grayson closed his eyes and held his son carefully, as if the whole world had finally become something he was strong enough to protect.
He had once believed winning meant standing above everyone else in a room.
That day, in a narrow apartment hallway with grocery bags on the floor and rain tapping the window, he understood he had been wrong.
Winning was this.
Being allowed to stay.
Being trusted not to disappear.
Being known by the people who had every reason not to let him close.
And whenever he remembered the Langford ballroom, the chandelier, the dropped glass, and Samara standing at the entrance with two children in her arms, he remembered the sentence that had changed him most.
Not knowing does not make you innocent.
It made him responsible.
And for the first time in his life, Grayson Holt stopped trying to outrun that responsibility and chose to become worthy of it.