BEG FOR ME, BILLIONAIRE

"Mama."I kept my hands in the warm soapy water. Eyes on the window above the sink, watching the last of the evening light disappear behind the maple trees."Mama.""Mm.""Do I have a dad?"My hands went still.I didn't move. Didn't turn around. Just stood there with soap running between my fingers and that question floating in the kitchen air like something that had been waiting a very long time to finally be said out loud.I turned the tap off. Dried my hands slowly. Then I turned around.Eli stood in the middle of the kitchen floor with his triceratops in one hand and his stegosaurus in the other, looking up at me with those grey eyes. The ones I spent the first year of his life trying not to look at too long. He wasn't upset. Wasn't scared. Just asking — the way he asked everything, straight out, no buildup, like the question had been sitting in his mouth all day waiting for a quiet moment to escape.Five years old and already the most honest person I had ever met.I crouched down

I didn't sleep.Not after the fourth call. Not after I turned the phone off completely and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling of the bedroom I had painted myself three years ago on a Saturday while Eli sat on the floor eating crackers and naming every dinosaur he owned.I turned it back on at six fifteen.Eleven missed calls. All the same unknown number. No voicemail.I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the screen for a long time.Then I got up, washed my face and started making Eli's breakfast like it was any other morning. Because for him, it had to be."Mama, can the ankylosaurus come to school today?""In your bag. Not on your desk.""What if he gets lonely in the bag?""He'll survive."Eli considered this seriously while eating his toast. He was wearing his red jumper with the hood he refused to take off indoors and his grey eyes were still half asleep, hair everywhere, completely unaware that his mother had been awake since nine thirty holding a phone and waiting for

"You're doing it again."I looked up from the hem I was pinning.Talia was leaning against my workroom doorframe with her arms crossed and that expression — the one that meant she had been watching me for longer than I realised and had decided to stop pretending she wasn't."Doing what," I said."That thing where you go very quiet and very busy at the same time." She pushed off the doorframe and came in. "It means you're scared.""I'm working.""Ivy.""I have three hems due by Friday.""And someone had a photograph of you coming out of your front door and was parked outside your son's school watching him." She sat down in the customer chair across from me. "So the hems can wait."I set the fabric down.She was right and we both knew it. I had spent the last hour moving between the workroom table and the kitchen and back again, keeping my hands occupied because occupied hands meant an occupied mind and an occupied mind didn't have to sit with what Fenne's text actually meant.Someone h

He was still at the end of the path.I had opened the door before he could knock and now we were here. Him at the garden gate. Me in the doorway. Five years of silence sitting between us like something with physical weight.I looked at him.Really looked. The kind of looking I had spent five years refusing to do because looking meant seeing and seeing meant feeling and I had been very, very careful about what I let myself feel.He was thinner. Not just thinner — diminished. The way illness diminishes people from the inside before it shows on the outside. Everything on him was still expensive. The coat. The shoes. The watch on his wrist that probably cost more than my cottage. All of it still announcing Cyrus Wray before he opened his mouth.But the body inside that expense was losing a war.You could see it in the shadows under his eyes. In the careful, rationed way he held himself — like every movement was being budgeted. Like he was spending something he did not have enough of.He o

Talia took one look at me and locked the front door.No hello. No questions. She just clocked my face, flipped the sign to closed, pointed at the kitchen and said "Back. Now." like I was one of her difficult customers and she was done being polite about it.I went.Eli was in the back room with his ankylosaur and half a biscuit, fully absorbed in whatever story he was narrating at the wall. Safe. Oblivious.Talia put the kettle on. Turned around. Crossed her arms."Start from when he knocked," she said."He didn't knock. I opened the door before he could."Her eyes said everything her mouth didn't. She waited.So I told her. All of it. His kidneys. The six months. No match anywhere in his family. Him standing at my kitchen table with his coat folded over the chair like he was in a boardroom. The terms I laid out. Every single one.Him agreeing without arguing.And then — because I had been carrying it since my front door closed and it had nowhere else to go — I told her what he said o