CHAPTER NINE

Aria’s POV

I never got the chance to call him first.

I spent the morning after the bill was cleared trying to find a way to reach Arthur Beaumont, turning the gesture over in my mind and grateful in a way I couldn’t explain.

I wanted him to know that this kind gesture matters to me a lot. That it wasn’t just a number disappearing from an account, but a small mercy that had let me breathe properly for the first time after I saw that bill at the hospital monitor.

I was still working up the nerve to track down a contact number when my phone rang with an unfamiliar number on the screen.

“Ms. Ashford.” It was a man from the other end of the call, but I recognized the voice immediately. It was him, Arthur. His voice was warm and unmistakable. “Arthur Beaumont. I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Not at all,” I said, surprised into honesty. “I was actually trying to find a way to reach you.”

“Were you.” There was a quiet pleasure in his voice at that, like the coincidence amused him. “I suppose we’ve saved each other the trouble, then.”

“I wanted to thank you properly,” I said. “For sorting the hospital bills, I don’t have the right words for how much that helped. I was sitting here with no idea what I was going to do, and then it just wasn’t a problem anymore. Thank you, Mr. Arthur.”

“That,” Arthur said, “is precisely the outcome I’d hoped for.”

“I’d still like to find some way to”

“Ms. Ashford.” Arthur cuts in, his tone was gentle but final, the same quiet authority I imagined had ended a thousand negotiations over the course of his life. “I have no interest in being repaid. I would consider it a far greater gift if you simply allowed me the pleasure of knowing your son is recovering well.”

How he said the words made arguing feel almost rude, like refusing a kindness offered without conditions.

“He’s recovering faster than the doctor would like, honestly,” I said. “Already convinced he can play football again by Friday.”

Arthur laughed, warm and unguarded. “I suspected as much. He didn’t strike me as a boy inclined toward patience.”

“You have no idea.”

We talked longer than I expected, the conversation moved without the strain I usually felt with strangers, especially strangers whose wealth and standing might have justified some distance.

Arthur asked about my work, about Bryan’s recovery, about small, ordinary things, and listened to my answers like they actually mattered to him rather than functioning as polite filler before he got to whatever point he was building toward.

“I’d like to ask for your approval on something, Ms. Ashford,” Arthur said from the other end of the phone. “I want to extend a hand of friendship, if you’ll allow it.”

That caught me off guard. Arthur is obviously of a higher status and to top that, he is wealthy. I don’t get to meet with such people casually, not to talk of being a friend.

But there was no obvious angle to it, nothing in his voice suggested an ulterior motive dressed up as warmth. Just an old man who had, for reasons I don’t fully understand, found something in a brief encounter with my son worth holding onto.

“I’d like that too,” I said. “I really would.”

“Good,” Arthur said, satisfaction clear in the single word. “Then let’s begin properly. How is he today? Up for a phone call from an old man he’s known for considerably less than an hour?”

I laughed, surprised. “He’d probably talk your ear off.”

“I look forward to it.”

I called Bryan over, and the rest of the conversation passed in a blur of overlapping voices. Bryan recounting the entire football tournament in exhaustive, occasionally inaccurate detail. Arthur asking exactly the right follow-up questions to keep him going, the two of them building an easy rapport that required no effort from me to maintain.

By the time the call ended, Bryan was already asking when Arthur would call again, and I found myself smiling at the question rather than worrying about the answer.

***********************************************

That single phone call became a pattern faster than I expected.

Arthur called two days later, then again at the end of the week, each time asking after Bryan first and me second, each conversation a little longer and a little easier than the one before it. Within two weeks, the calls had become a fixture Bryan looked forward to with the same eagerness he reserved for cartoons and ice cream, a standing appointment neither of us had formally scheduled but both quietly protected.

He started sending gifts. Small at first, a box of chocolate and animated cartoon books, beautifully illustrated, exactly the kind Bryan would have chosen for himself if given the option. Then, next, a bicycle, helmet included, delivered to our apartment with a note that simply read: For when the ankle allows it. In a handwriting that looked like it belonged on a legal document rather than a child’s gift tag.

I called him after the bicycle arrived, half to thank him and half to gently push back on the scale of it.

“Arthur, this is too much.”

“It is not,” he said, entirely unbothered. “I missed the opportunity to spoil a child of my own as thoroughly as I would have liked. Allow an old man his second chance.”

There was a thing in the way he said the words, a flicker of something heavier beneath the lightness, it made me wonder briefly about the family he hadn’t mentioned yet, but I didn’t push. Our friendship, new as it was, still operated on the unspoken understanding that some doors opened only when their owners were ready.

By the third week, Arthur began visiting in person.

He came on a Saturday afternoon first, dressed down from a black tailored coat, carrying a small chess set he insisted Bryan was old enough to learn, despite my polite skepticism.

I watched the two of them sit cross-legged on our living room floor, an eccentric billionaire and a five-year-old, equally absorbed in a board of chess Bryan barely understood.

Arthur was patient in a way few adults managed to be with young children. He didn’t simplify his attention for Bryan; he gave it fully, and completely, the way he might have given it to a board of directors or a foreign dignitary.

Bryan responded to that the way he responded to anyone who treated him with affection, with complete unguarded devotion.

The visits quickly became a routine. Arthur visited most weekends. Sometimes, he brought small gifts, sometimes just himself and an afternoon of undivided attention, and each time he left, Bryan would ask the same question with the same hopeful insistence.

“When is he coming back?”

I never had to wonder the same thing for long because Arthur always came back.

**********************************************

It was on one of those Saturday visits, weeks into the friendship, that Arthur asked the question that would quietly reshape everything that came after.

We were in the kitchen, Bryan had ran off mid-game to retrieve a toy he insisted Arthur needed to see, leaving the two of us alone for a few minutes with cups of tea neither of us had touched.

Arthur was watching the doorway Bryan had disappeared through with an expression I had seen on his face more than once now but never quite understood. A thoughtful, almost searching look, like he was working through a puzzle he hadn’t mentioned to me yet.

“Ms. Ashford,” he said, turning back to me. “I have a request, and I want you to feel entirely comfortable to decline it if you’re not okay with it.”

“Go on,” I said.

“My estate has more space than any one old man requires,” he said. “Grounds, a library Bryan would likely enjoy tearing apart, far too many empty rooms that haven’t held a child’s laughter in longer than I’d like to admit.” He paused, choosing his next words with visible care. “I would like Bryan to spend occasional weekends there. With your full permission of course, and only if you and him are both comfortable with it.”

I considered that for a moment, weighing the instinct against the steady trust Arthur had earned over the past several weeks, one gesture at a time.

“I think,” I said slowly, “he would love that.”

Arthur’s relief was immediate and entirely visible, almost emotional. “Thank you,” he said with a smile.

I had no way of knowing, that I had just agreed to a request far larger than a weekend visit, and somewhere behind Arthur’s request was the first thread of a truth neither of us had uncovered yet.