CHAPTER FIVE: The Number

Emma's POV

I am in my childhood bedroom at my parents' house in San Diego by Sunday evening, which is a sentence I have not expected to be true at twenty-six, but here we are.

The room still has the same curtains from when I was seventeen and a bookshelf full of books I have read so many times the spines have given up, and I am lying on the bed staring at the ceiling and trying to decide whether the nausea sitting under my ribs is anxiety or something else entirely.

Three weeks pass this way.

I sign everything Liam's lawyer sends over. Every page. Every clause. Every generous line item written in the specific language of a man who wants a clean divorce and is willing to pay for the cleanness. I do not negotiate. I do not push back. I do not ask for more than what is offered because more than what is offered would require me to still be in contact with him and I am done being in contact with him.

My mother watches me sign each document with the specific silence of a woman who has opinions and is choosing not to voice them.

"You could have gotten more," she says once, quietly, over tea.

"I could have gotten more from a stranger who owed me nothing," I reply. "This isn't about the money."

She does not ask again.

I am lying on the bed on a Wednesday morning three weeks after the divorce finalises when my phone rings with a number I do not recognise.

I almost do not answer.

"Ms. Bellamy?"

The voice does not call me Mrs. Carson. It calls me Ms. Bellamy. My name. The one I was born with. The one I have apparently not entirely lost even when I thought I had traded it in.

"Yes," I reply.

"My name is Gerald Fitch. I'm calling on behalf of the Bellamy Estate."

I sit up.

"I'm sorry. The Bellamy Estate?"

"Your parents established a Trust in your name when you were four years old, Ms. Bellamy. The terms specified that it would become accessible to you either on your thirtieth birthday or at a point of significant personal need, whichever came first." A pause. "It has come to our attention that the second condition has been met."

I look at the seventeen-year-old curtains.

"How did you determine that?"

"We have monitored for certain conditions over the years," he says, which is either reassuring or extremely unsettling and I have not yet decided which. "The important thing is that the trust is now available to you in full."

I say nothing.

"Would you like me to tell you the amount?"

"Yes, please."

He tells me.

I do not say anything for a moment.

"I'm sorry," I reply. "Can you repeat that?"

He repeats it.

I stand up from the bed.

I walk to the window and I look out at my parents' garden where my father is doing something involving a hose and appears to be losing the argument, and I think about my childhood in this house. The good school they worked hard to pay for. The secondhand car my mother drove until it genuinely could not be driven anymore. The birthday parties that were always warm and full of people and never quite as expensive as my friends' parties.

They have had this the whole time.

They have had this and they have chosen to save it for me. To set it aside untouched. For a moment exactly like this one.

"Ms. Bellamy?"

"Yes. I'm here."

"Would you like me to email the full documentation?"

"Please. Give me a moment to think about the delivery address."

"Of course," he says. "Take your time."

I hang up.

I stand at the window for a long time.

Then I go downstairs and sit at the kitchen table where my mother is making lunch and ask, "Mom. Did you know about the Trust Fund?"

She sets down the knife she is holding.

Turns around.

"Your father and I wanted to make sure that whatever happened in your life, you would never be without options."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because if you had known it was there, you might have used it before you needed it. And we wanted you to need it for something real. For something that was yours." She looks at me steadily. "Is it time?"

I think about the number Gerald Fitch just said out loud.

I think about Paris.

I think about a cracked ceiling and a new start and a person I have not yet become but I am beginning to have a fairly specific idea about.

"Yes," I reply. "It's time."

My mother nods.

Then she picks up her knife.

"Lunch first," she says.

"Mom."

"You're pregnant and you haven't eaten since breakfast. Paris will still be there after the sandwich."

I sit down.

She makes the sandwich.

Outside, my father discovers that the hose is still running.

---

I go back upstairs after lunch and I open my laptop and I sit on the bed in my childhood bedroom and I look at the number in the email Gerald Fitch has just sent through and I look at it for a long time.

It is not a modest number.

It is not a comfortable number.

It is the kind of number that changes the entire shape of what is possible.

I close the email.

I open a new document.

I sit with my hands on the keyboard and I think about the last two years. The dresses that did not zip. The staff who never learned my name. The dinners where I stood behind rather than beside. The board wives who tolerated me because Liam required them to. The women behind the pillar at the Harrington Gala with their soft aimed laughs.

She always looks so uncomfortable. Like she knows she shouldn't be there.

I think about the receipt.

The photograph.

The bracelet with its card.

For when you don't have to wait anymore.

I think about Liam serving the divorce over coffee like he was cancelling a subscription and Talia standing in my bedroom doorway with her key and no hard feelings on her end and heels on my hardwood floor at twelve forty-three in the morning.

I think about all of it.

Then I look at the number on my laptop screen.

And I understand something for the first time.

I am not going to Paris to start over.

Starting over is what I was going to do before that phone call. Starting over was the plan when I thought I was going with nothing but a suitcase and dignity and the vague hope of building something small enough to hide behind.

I am not going to hide.

I am going to Paris to become someone Liam Carson will one day walk into a room and not recognise. Someone Talia Sinclair will read about in business publications and understand, too late, exactly what she helped throw away. Someone the women behind the pillar will tell their friends they always knew was going to be something extraordinary, back when they knew her, back when she was married to that Carson man, do you remember.

I am going to Paris to become the woman none of them ever bothered to see.

I put both hands flat on the keyboard.

I type one sentence at the top of the blank document.

What do I want to build?

I look at that sentence for a moment.

Then I delete it.

And I type a new one.

What am I going to build?

The difference is small.

The difference is everything.

I sit at my childhood desk in my childhood bedroom with a number on my screen that changes every calculation I have ever made about my life, and I feel something arrive in my chest that I have not felt in two years.

Not hope.

Not relief.

Something colder and cleaner and considerably more useful.

Intent.

I put my hand on my stomach.

"Okay," I say quietly, to the small warm impossible thing sitting under my palm. "Let's go build something they'll never see coming."

Outside, the San Diego afternoon goes gold.

Inside, in a childhood bedroom in a house that suddenly feels much smaller than it did an hour ago, a woman who used to be Mrs. Liam Carson opens a new browser tab and books a one-way ticket to Paris.