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chapter 488

Author: Deedson
last update publish date: 2026-10-24 00:43:07

Point of View: Alexander

"Papa, I am holding your chess king. I have held it for a whole day. Tell me why a man who never missed a board meeting never once told his own son where he spent his Sundays."

My father lay propped against pillows in the big bed upstairs, in the room that smelled of camphor and old books. It was seven in the evening, Thursday. The curtains were half drawn, and a thin line of dusk lay across the quilt. Nurse Okoye sat by the window with her knitting, pretending not to l
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  • The Billionaire's Secret Bride   chapter 540

    Point of View: Elena“Give it to Lena, Victor. Not to me, and not to Vanessa. It was written by her husband, and it is hers to open first.”I said it quietly, from the back row, and every head turned. I had not meant to speak. But Victor’s hand was trembling as it held out that small brown square, and I could not bear to watch it shake in the air.Victor looked at me. Then he looked at Lena Marsh, standing at his father’s side in her darned cardigan. He crossed the room as if he were walking through water. He stopped in front of her and held out the page in both hands, like a boy returning something he had stolen.“Mrs. Marsh,” he said. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.”Lena did not take it at once. She studied him for a long moment, this gray, well dressed man of sixty who had once been a pale boy with a tray of papers.“You were nineteen,” she said.“I was a coward.”“You were nineteen and a coward. Both can be true.” She lifted the page from his palms. “Hold my stick.”He took the stick

  • The Billionaire's Secret Bride   chapter 539

    Point of View: Alexander“Sit down, Mr. Sterling. You are not on the agenda, and you are not on this board. Today you are only a husband in the back row. Please behave like one.”Victor Halden said it from the head of the walnut table, in the boardroom on the top floor of the Sterling Grand. It was nine in the morning on Monday. Pale rain light filled the tall windows, and the city lay gray and shining below. Twelve directors sat in leather chairs. Dalton Reyes sat at the far end, folding and unfolding his glasses. Ms. Pryce had her leather folder open. Vanessa and Marcus sat side by side near the middle, as still as two people carved from the same stone.I sat in the last row of chairs against the wall, with Elena on my left and Claire on my right. My hands lay on my knees. I had never in my life been so aware of my own hands.“I will sit,” I said, and I sat.“Good.” Victor smiled. “Now, Mr. Reyes. Your motion.”Dalton rose. He looked at his papers rather than at Vanessa. “I move tha

  • The Billionaire's Secret Bride   chapter 538

    Point of View: Elena“I will give you ten minutes to explain the bank, Alexander. Not ten minutes to apologize. I have heard you apologize all weekend. Ten minutes to tell me why you did not trust me.”Vanessa said it at the long table in the lodge library on Sunday night, with a legal pad in front of her and a cold cup of tea at her elbow. The fire popped. The shelves were crowded with old paperbacks that smelled of mildew. I sat in the corner chair with a blanket over my knees, because Vanessa had asked me to stay, and because I would not have left my husband alone in that room for anything.Alexander stood across from her in his gray sweater with the stiff look of a man waiting for a verdict.“I will not need ten minutes,” he said. “I was afraid. I was afraid you would lose, and that losing would hurt you more than I could stand. So I reached for the one thing I knew how to do. It was not a plan. It was panic dressed as help.”Vanessa studied him. I saw her want to be angry, and I

  • The Billionaire's Secret Bride   chapter 537

    Point of View: Alexander“I drove your father to that signing, Marcus. I sat outside for two hours with the engine running. I have never forgiven myself. Today I would like you to decide whether you will.”Abel Pike said it in the boot room at the back of the lodge, on Sunday afternoon, with rain still dripping from his hat. The little room smelled of wet wool and woodsmoke. Coats hung on pegs. A single bare window let in a bar of white light.I had been waiting at the lodge all day with the original transfer locked in my room, pacing like a caged man. When the car pulled into the yard and I saw Elena, Claire, and Lena climbing out, with Abel behind them carrying a bundle in oilcloth, I almost ran out into the mud.Marcus had arrived ten minutes earlier. Now he stood by the long bench with his coat still on, looking at the man who had taught him to ride a bicycle in our father’s yard.The papers lay on the bench between us. Both copies of the transfer. The receipts, the ledger, the no

  • The Billionaire's Secret Bride   chapter 536

    Point of View: Elena“Open it yourself, Elena. My husband kept his lunch in that box for twenty two years. I will not be the one who finds it empty.”Lena Marsh said it in the basement of the old Sterling Grand Hotel, at eight o’clock on Sunday morning. We stood in a long, cold passage below the lobby, where the pipes knocked and the air tasted of dust and wet stone. Rows of narrow green lockers lined the wall, their paint cracked like dry mud. Each had a number stenciled in white. A single bulb swung overhead, and our shadows swung with it.Claire stood beside me in her gray coat. Lena leaned on her stick on my other side. We had told no one where we were going except Alexander, and he had stayed behind at the lodge with the original transfer, because Vanessa had asked him to bring it to her on Monday and not before.“It is the very end of the row,” Claire whispered.We walked slowly. I counted the numbers aloud, because it helped me breathe. Ninety eight. Ninety nine. A hundred. Som

  • The Billionaire's Secret Bride   chapter 535

    Point of View: Alexander“Sit down, Alexander. Your mother once begged me to burn every letter I ever wrote her. I never did. Shall I tell you why she asked, or would you prefer not to know?”Gerald Halden’s room was at the end of the upper hall, small and plain, with a single lamp burning on the nightstand. It was almost eleven on Saturday night. The rain had stopped. I had spent the day in a fog of shame, on the phone with Hannah, with the bank, with a lawyer who spoke very slowly. At last the purchase was frozen. It was not undone, only held. Vanessa had said, flatly, “We will deal with it Monday,” and left me in the hall like a man who has been politely shown the door.I sat on the hard chair. Gerald sat on the bed, bent forward over his cane, the lamp throwing his shadow huge across the wall.“I am listening,” I said.“What do you know of her, before she was a Sterling?”“Very little. Naomi found a photograph last month. Two young people in aprons at a kitchen door. A girl with a

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