All Chapters of I BECAME THE BILLIONAIRE'S WIFE OVERNIGHT : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Nathaniel's POV"You've been in that office until two in the morning three nights running," Emily said, standing in the doorway of my study with her arms crossed, "and I would like you to explain to me why that suddenly feels familiar in a way I don't like."I had not meant to let it get this far. In the days since Marcus's visit, I had told myself, each individual night, that I would tell her tomorrow, once I understood the full scope of what he actually had, once I had a plan solid enough that presenting the problem wouldn't also mean presenting my own fear alongside it. Each individual night, tomorrow had not arrived, and instead I had simply worked later, spoken less, let the careful management I'd promised her I was done with slowly reassemble itself around me like a coat I'd claimed to have thrown away."I'm handling something with the board," I said, which was true, and which was also, I recognized even as I said it, precisely the kind of half truth that had ended my first enga

Nathaniel's POV"It wasn't your father who buried the inspection report," Dana said, sliding a folder across my desk with hands that weren't quite steady, "it was Marcus's father, and Marcus has known that for years."I stared at the folder for a long moment before I made myself open it, Emily standing beside me with her hand steady on my shoulder, the two of us finally facing whatever this actually was together instead of one of us carrying it alone. Dana had spent the two days since our conversation on the rooftop quietly tracing the actual source of the documents Marcus was threatening to release, working channels I hadn't even known she had access to, and what she'd found rewrote the entire shape of the fight."The inspection failure that caused the fire," Dana said, pulling a chair closer and lowering her voice even though the office door was already closed, "was signed off on by the subcontractor's site supervisor at the time. That supervisor answered directly to your uncle Rich

Nathaniel's POV"You think you've won something," Marcus said, standing in my office doorway without an appointment, "but all you've actually done is give me a reason to stop being careful about who gets hurt on the way down."I had known this conversation was coming the moment Dana confirmed Marcus had somehow learned we'd already spoken to Eleanor. What I hadn't expected was how much smaller he looked saying it, a man who had spent a decade building himself up as the reasonable alternative to my leadership, suddenly reduced to threats made in a doorway because the ground under his original plan had just disappeared."Sit down, Marcus," I said, keeping my voice level, though something in me wanted very badly not to. "Or don't. But you should know before you say anything else that Eleanor knows about your father. She knows you've known for years."His jaw tightened. "My father made one decision under pressure, decades ago, and you people have decided that's enough to erase everything

Nathaniel's POV"You're managing me again," Emily said, cutting me off mid sentence at eleven at night, "and I need you to hear how it sounds when I say it out loud to your face this time."We were on our third run through the presentation, the two of us alone in the study while Dana finalized the slides in the next room, and I had just spent ten minutes rewriting Emily's portion of our timeline without asking her first, softening the language around her father's loan because some old instinct in me still flinched at putting his shame on public display."I was trying to protect your father's dignity," I said, already hearing how thin that sounded even as I said it."By deciding for him what protecting his dignity looks like," Emily said, not unkindly, but firmly, the way she said everything that mattered. "My father sat in our kitchen and agreed to show the board every one of those documents, unedited, because he understands better than anyone what it cost him to hide this for six yea

Nathaniel's POV"Before you say anything else, Marcus," I said, standing at the head of the long glass table with every board member watching, "I think you should know we already have a recording of you asking someone to commit fraud."The room went still in a way I had never heard a boardroom go still before, forty years of accumulated corporate politeness collapsing into something closer to held breath. Marcus, three seats down, went very pale, his hand tightening around a folder I recognized as the same one he'd waved in my face in Emily's father's bakery weeks earlier."That's a fabrication," he said, too quickly, his voice cracking in a way that told the room everything before I even needed to play the recording."It isn't," Emily said, standing beside me, calm in a way I had come to recognize as her most dangerous state, the stillness right before she said something no one in the room would be able to argue with. "We have Vanessa's recording, and we have my father's original loa