บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire's Forgotten Wife : บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 8

Nobody stood behind me when I turned around that night. That was worse than if somebody had.Just rain. A parked car across the street, lights off. Wet shine on the road, streetlamp light breaking apart in the puddles like something spilled and left to sit. I turned in a slow circle like an idiot, waiting for a face to match the words still glowing on my phone.Nothing.No footsteps. No shape ducking out of sight, no door easing shut somewhere down the block. Just me, soaked through, staring at two lines from a number I didn’t know.I know you’re outside. Turn around.I stared at it until the screen went dark on its own. I stood there a while longer after that, arms wrapped around myself, rain finding the gap at my collar and running down between my shoulder blades. Going home meant the night was over. Some stubborn part of me wasn’t ready to call it.I checked the street one more time. Still nothing. Whoever sent that message either wasn’t real, or was better at hiding than I was at

I don’t have a wife listed on this file.That sentence followed me out of my own kitchen and into a room full of women wearing my old life like it was theirs to borrow.I shouldn’t have come. I knew that walking in. But I’d sat on this committee for three years, picked the linens for this exact room more than once, and some stubborn habit in me still expected an invitation even now.Nobody had un-invited me. Nobody had to. The second I stepped through the door, I felt it — conversations dipping low, heads turning just enough, eyes sliding away a half second too fast to be an accident.They knew.Whatever happened four days ago in some lawyer’s office, this room knew about it long before I did.I found her near the dessert table. Margaret Cole, standing over a tiered display of petit fours nobody was touching, dressed the way she always dressed for these things — expensive, understated, armor disguised as good taste.“Margaret.”She turned, and her face did the thing it always does whe

“Ma’am? Ma’am, are you still there?”“I’m here,” I said, and hung up before she could ask me anything else.Eight months. I sat with that number a long time, the flowers going soft and forgotten on my counter, until the shaking in my hands finally slowed enough to think straight. There was only one person left who might tell me the truth without a script sitting in front of him first.Gerald.I called ahead. He said come by, too fast, the way people do when they’ve been waiting for a call and dreading it at the same time.His hands were shaking before I said a single word, and I hadn’t even sat down yet.I found him in his study, surrounded by the usual mess — half-read books stacked wrong, a manuscript spread across the desk I’d spent three years helping him shape into something he could put his name on. He stood too fast when I walked in, knocking his knee against the drawer.“Elena.” He said my name like it cost him something. “Come in, sit — can I get you tea, coffee—”“I’m fine,

I know what really happened. Call me when you’re ready to hear it.I stared at that message until Romilly leaned over and looked at my screen too. Neither of us said anything for a second. Just the two of us in that office, city lights coming on outside the window, both of us reading the same six words over and over like they might rearrange themselves into something less unsettling.Then she reached for a pen and wrote the number down on her legal pad, underlined it twice, hard enough that the pen almost tore through the paper.“We’re not calling it yet,” she said. “Not until we know who’s on the other end.”She was right. I didn’t call it. I put my phone away, finished the conversation with her, gathered my coat, and went home to a night of staring at my ceiling instead of sleeping. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the message glowing there in the dark. I know what really happened. Not I think. Not I heard. Known, stated plain, like a fact somebody had been sitting on for a while,