CHAPTER TWENTY

Aria’s POV

I was surprised when I got the appointment letter.

It was a cream envelope with the Beaumont Group letterhead embossed in the upper left corner, my name written across the front in clean font.

I stood at the mailbox outside my building for a moment just looking at it, the way you looked at something that had arrived from a direction you hadn’t been watching. I didn’t apply for a job position at the Beaumont Group. My only job there was the fumigation contract.

I looked at the letter in my hand.

“Was there a mixup?”

I opened it at the kitchen table with Bryan at school and a cup of tea going cold beside me.

Dear Ms. Ashford,

Following a review of our internal accounts team requirements, we would like to formally extend an offer of employment for the position of Junior Accounts Associate at Beaumont Group.

I read it twice. Then a third time, slowly, making sure I was reading it correctly and not constructing something I wanted to see out of words that actually said something different.

It was real.

A full-time position. Accounts associate, junior grade, with a structured progression path and a fat salary figure that sat in the middle of the page like something I had to read three times before my brain accepted it as a number attached to my name, including benefits and paid leave.

The kind of contract that came with an HR department and a pension contribution and the security of a role that didn’t depend on my cousin’s small business staying afloat month to month.

I set the letter down and stared into blank space.

Xavier Beaumont had offered me a job.

I don’t know how to contain the joy in my heart, I was so restless with excitement.

The Beaumont name kept arriving in my life from directions I hadn’t anticipated, and I didn’t entirely know what to do with the pattern of it.

I picked the letter up again and read the salary figure one more time.

It was nearly double what Mr. Murphy paid me, combined with what I currently made at Greenfield, I was already stretching every month to cover rent, Bryan’s school, groceries, and the rotating cast of unexpected expenses that came with raising a child in a city that had no interest in making it affordable. This number, on its own, covered all of it comfortably with room for left over for the first time in five years.

The conflict arrived alongside the arithmetic.

I had convinced myself that the dynamic between Xavier Beaumont and me was professional. Nothing beyond the reasonable friendliness of a billionaire company owner and his contract employee.

But I was not naive enough, sitting at my dining table with his job offer in my hand, to pretend that a man who ran a forty-two floor corporate empire had done this for professional reasons only.

Even if he has ulterior motives, the job was genuinely too good, and I don’t have the luxury of refusing good opportunities because the person extending them was complicated.

I folded the letter back into its envelope and set it on the kitchen counter where I could see it.

***

Bryan came home at half past three in the afternoon with grass stains on both knees and a drawing he’d made at school that he insisted I look at.

I looked. “It was,” he explained with great seriousness, “a picture of our apartment, with two figures in front of it, one tall, one small and above the small one, a crown.”

“Who’s the crown for?” I asked.

“Me,” he said. “Because I live there and it’s my kingdom.”

“It’s a one-bedroom apartment, baby.”

“Kingdoms come in different sizes,” he said, completely unbothered, and went to drop his bag in his room.

I watched him go and felt the specific, chest-expanding feeling I felt when he said something that was accidentally more profound than he knew he was being.

I took the letter off the counter.

When he came back, he changed out of his school uniform and already angling toward the kitchen for a snack, I sat down at the table and patted the chair beside me. He climbed up with the easy compliance of a boy who associated the table with either food or interesting conversations, and sat in.

“I need to tell you something,” I said.

He looked at me with the full, unblinking attention he gave things he decided were worth listening to.

“Someone offered me a new job today,” I said. “A big one. At a very big building downtown.”

“Bigger than your current job?”

“Much bigger.”

He thought about this. “Would you still pick me up from school?”

“Yes,” I said. The hours in the offer letter were standard — eight to five, Monday to Friday, with flexibility noted for school commitments. I had read that part too.

“Would we still have movie nights on Friday?”

“Every single one,” I said.

He absorbed this with the gravity of a five-year-old weighing a serious matter. Then: “Would we have more money?”

I paused slightly at that one, at the fact that he knew to ask it, at the five years of careful management that had apparently been less invisible to him than I’d hoped.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “We would have more money.”

Bryan was quiet for a moment, his small brow furrowed in concentration. Then he looked up at me with the clear, uncomplicated certainty that only existed in people who hadn’t yet learned to second-guess themselves.

“Then you should do it, Mom,” he said. Like it was the simplest thing in the world.

I looked at him. This boy who had cost me everything and given me everything back in a completely different shape. I felt the decision settle somewhere it hadn’t been able to settle all afternoon.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I should.”

Bryan slid off the chair and headed for the kitchen. “Can I have a biscuit?”

“One,” I said.

He grinned and came back with two.

I reached for the letter, smoothed it flat on the table, and started composing my acceptance in my head before I’d found a pen to write it with.