All Chapters of The Billionaire's Runaway Country Girl : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

33 Chapters

Chapter Twenty One

Jules' POVThe man who served me was unremarkable in the way that men who do that job professionally make themselves unremarkable — medium height, jacket, a face assembled from completely average parts. He knocked on my apartment door at 9:40 on a Thursday morning while Eli was at daycare and Madeline was at school and I was sitting at the kitchen table in my pajamas with a cup of coffee and a manuscript I was supposed to be editing.He said my name. Julia Rose Arthur. Not Casey — he had done his research.He handed me an envelope.I said, with the particular wariness of a person who has been through enough to recognize the shape of bad news even inside a legal envelope, "What is this?"He said the name of the filing court. He said the words custody and petition. He handed me a second form to sign acknowledging receipt. I signed it in the doorway with my coffee still in my other hand, the mug warm against my palm, and I watched him walk back down the hall with the methodical pace of s

Chapter Twenty Two

Adam's POVHe had built a company from nothing and a reputation on precision, and the thing that undid him in the lobby was not Jules's anger — he had expected that, had been braced for it from the moment the front desk called up — but the single detail she said when she handed him the papers.Two weeks ago.He had turned that date over in his mind the whole time Cooper was running the filing records. Two weeks ago, he had not known Eli existed. Two weeks ago, he had been in another city entirely, signing off on an acquisition that had nothing to do with Millhaven or Jules or a small boy in rocket pajamas. Two weeks ago, the only people who had known both that Jules was in Millhaven and that she had a child who might be his were the people Cooper had told, and Cooper had told no one, and Elena.Elena, who had clearly been watching longer than he had understood.He called Cooper from the window while Jules stood behind him in the lobby radiating a very controlled, very quiet kind of de

Chapter Twenty Three

Jules' POVHe kept showing up.That was the thing. I had not anticipated the showing up. I had anticipated the legal battle, the lawyers, the cold back-and-forth of a man with resources trying to insert himself into a life he had no part in building. I had anticipated distance and bureaucracy and maybe eventually a court-appointed mediator with a clipboard. I had not anticipated Adam Casey at my door on a Saturday morning with two grocery bags and a cautious expression, saying: "Eli mentioned he likes blueberries. I wasn't sure which brand."I stared at him."He told me at the baseball game," Adam said. "He gave me a full ranking of his top five fruits. Blueberries were second. Mango was first but he said—" he looked at the bag— "it's complicated with mango."I had not moved from the doorway."Jules." He held the bags out slightly. Not pushily. Just presenting them, the way you present evidence to someone who is deciding whether to believe you. "I'm not asking to come in. You can take

Chapter Twenty Four

Adam's POVThe dossier Cooper put in front of him contained forty-seven pages.Adam had built a company by reading dense documentation quickly and retaining the critical details — financial models, acquisition contracts, legal briefs — and he read the forty-seven pages in twenty-four minutes. When he was done he set it on the coffee table in his hotel suite and sat with it for a moment the way you sit with something after a car crash, when the adrenaline has already peaked and you are now just assessing the damage.Forty-seven pages of documented evidence. The fire. The witness payments. The forged authorization. The investigator Elena had hired to surveil Jules's apartment, Eli's daycare, Jules's work schedule. A record of financial transfers to Marcus Veil. A record of calls to a man whose name appeared in a separate attached report as having a history of contract intimidation."She had Eli's daycare location," Adam said. He had to say it out loud to make sure he understood it corre

Chapter Twenty Five

Jules' POVGeorge Halloran had a good face.I say that first because it's true and because I want to be fair to him, which he deserved. He was the kind of man who had assembled his life with care and kept it in good order: a graphic designer who worked from home on the floor below us, who knocked on our door once a week with a surplus of something from his vegetable garden and stayed for twenty minutes and never stayed longer, who remembered that Eli was allergic to strawberries after being told once and always checked. He was thirty-six, recently out of a quiet and apparently peaceful marriage that had simply run its course, and he had been looking at me since our second week in the building with an expression I recognized and had been — very gently, very carefully — not acknowledging.He asked me to dinner on a Thursday.He came to the door with a recipe he'd been testing — some French thing with a sauce that had taken him three attempts to get right — and we'd been standing in the

Chapter Twenty Six

Jules' POVHe called on a Sunday evening.I knew it was him because my phone had six contacts and I had saved his number — Adam C — sometime in the last two weeks without consciously deciding to. Eli was asleep. Madeline was at a gallery opening. The apartment was quiet in the particular Sunday way, all soft edges and dim light. I picked up on the third ring."Hi," I said."Hi." A beat. "Is it okay that I called?""You can call."I heard him settle somewhere — the faint sound of him sitting down, the ambient quiet of wherever he was. I pictured his hotel room and then didn't want to picture his hotel room, because hotel rooms were solitary and I had spent enough time imagining him as a solitary person to have a complicated relationship with the image."I've been thinking about something you said," he said. "In the hallway. When you came to the hotel.""I said several things in the hallway.""You said you were running out of cities to hide in."I pulled the blanket from the back of the

Chapter Twenty Seven

Adam's POVHe had agreed to the baseball game on a Tuesday evening in the parking lot of Eli's daycare, which was a sentence that still had the quality of an implausible dream when he replayed it.Jules had met him there — neutral ground, her choice, which was correct — to pick Eli up, and Eli had come out of the building at full speed, as Eli always did, and had registered Adam standing beside his mother with an expression of uncomplicated delight that Adam was not prepared for and had to look away from briefly to collect himself."Are you coming too?" Eli demanded."If that's okay with your mom," Adam said.Eli looked at Jules with the frank, assessing look of a child who had not yet learned to be subtle. Jules looked at Adam with the frank, assessing look of a woman who had."Saturday," she said. "He likes the Millhaven Caps. Home game at two.""Done," Adam said.* * *Saturday came. Adam was outside the building at 1:15 because he had left the hotel at 12:40 out of a nervousness h

Chapter Twenty Eight

Jules' POVHe asked me on a Wednesday.It had been three weeks since the baseball game. Three weeks of a new routine that had installed itself into our lives the way sun installs itself in a room — not all at once, not with announcement, just a gradual warm presence that you start to arrange your mornings around. Adam came on Tuesdays and Saturdays, mostly, and sometimes Wednesday evenings if I texted him that Eli had a question he wanted to discuss. The questions were many and wide-ranging. Recent topics had included: why the sky changed color at sunset (Eli remained skeptical of the full scientific explanation), whether trains could theoretically be friends with cars (Adam had navigated this diplomatically), and what the largest animal that had ever lived was (blue whale, which Eli found briefly devastating and then accepted with resilience).Adam handled all of these with the same focused, genuine attention, which I had found was the thing I most needed to watch in order to trust i

Chapter Twenty Nine

Jules' POV / Adam's POVJules' POVHe found it in forty-eight hours, which was testament to either how determined he was or how good Cooper's secondary assistant was at logistics. Either way, on Friday morning Adam texted me a photograph of a house — wood and stone, big windows, surrounded by pine trees, a lake behind it that was flat and silver in the morning light — and said: This weekend, if you're open to it. All three of us. No agenda. Just somewhere different.I showed the photograph to Eli, who was eating toast at the kitchen table.He looked at it for approximately three seconds. "Is that a lake?""Yes.""Do you swim in it?""I think so.""We should go," Eli said, and went back to his toast with the decisiveness of a person who had resolved the matter.* * *We arrived Friday evening. The drive was two hours north and Eli spent most of it asleep in the back seat in the way he had at the baseball game, so sudden and complete that I had stopped being surprised by it. Adam drove.

Chapter Thirty

Adam's POVThey came back from the lake house on Sunday evening, and on Monday morning a package arrived at Cooper's office.He called Adam at 7:12 AM."Are you somewhere private?"Adam stepped away from the hotel breakfast bar into the corridor. "Talk.""Something arrived this morning. Physical delivery, overnight courier. No return address, no sender name. Clean — I had it swept, no devices, nothing unusual." A pause. "It's a full evidentiary package, Adam. I need you to understand what I mean when I say full. Professional organization, tabbed sections, cross-referenced. The level of documentation in here goes beyond what my team had compiled independently."Adam leaned against the corridor wall. "What does it contain?""Everything. The arson — not just the witness payments, the actual financial chain, three steps deeper than what I had, including Sal's original engagement contract with Elena, which I did not have. The custody forgery, with Marcus Veil's internal communications. The

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