CHAPTER 3: Found

Selene Castellano’s Point of View

Her calculator had given up an hour ago, leaving Selene stuck, eyes glued to the same numbers that now just blended into a messy blur. It was all red ink—like some wild abstract painting gone wrong—a chaotic splash of financial disaster that she couldn’t escape.

Hospital bills for Maya were scattered all over the kitchen table, much like a pile of fallen autumn leaves, each one representing a different kind of emergency. Some screamed “PAST DUE” in aggressive red letters, while others shouted “FINAL NOTICE” with that cold, intimidating tone only paperwork can manage. It squeezed her heart every time.

Eight hundred forty-seven thousand, three hundred ninety-two dollars.

That’s the jaw-dropping price tag for keeping her sister alive when insurance companies decided that experimental treatments didn’t qualify as “medically necessary.” As if Stage Three lymphoma was some choice Maya made, like picking up yoga or deciding to learn a new language.

Selene’s tiny apartment in the Tenderloin smelled like the Indian restaurant downstairs mixed with the constant haze of someone’s weed habit. The walls were paper-thin; she could easily hear her neighbour’s TV through the plaster. Apparently, Judge Judy was very, very disappointed in someone’s life decisions tonight.

Join the club, Selene thought.

“Welcome to the club,” Selene thought dryly.

Her phone buzzed. The nonprofit where she did grant writing three afternoons a week, asking if she could cover tomorrow’s shift. The regular bookkeeper was sick. She texted back yes before checking her calendar. She’d figure out how to be in three places at once. She always did. It was a skill by now.

A knock on her door made her jump.

Selene wasn’t used to visitors. Her life had shrunk down to a tiny loop: work, hospital visits, home, rinse and repeat. She hadn’t had anyone over for months—no energy left to keep up the act of having a life or being the person who had things figured out.

She glanced through the peephole.

And her heart froze.

There stood Avalon Pierce, looking like he’d just stepped out of a high-fashion magazine, dressed in a suit that probably cost more than her rent, tailored to perfection in some shade of grey. His dark hair was flawlessly styled, and those green eyes were still the same ones that once looked at her like she was the unsolvable mystery in his life.

Ten years. It had been ten years since she’d seen that face.

A decade since she’d walked away from Stanford, from him, from the future they’d dreamed and talked about during three AM study sessions in the library. Ten years since she’d driven her bleeding self to San Francisco General Hospital alone, and lost everything that mattered.

Her hand shook on the doorknob.

Don’t open it. Don’t open it. Don’t open it.

She opened it.

“Hello, Selene.” His voice was the same. Deep, careful, controlled. The voice of someone who’d learned to keep every emotion locked behind bulletproof glass.

“Avalon.” Her voice felt strange in her own ears—thin, like it belonged to someone smaller and more fragile than she felt inside. “What are you doing here?”

“May I come in?”

“No.” The word came out on autopilot. Self-defense. He couldn’t step inside. He couldn’t see the mess of bills that looked like evidence of her collapse, couldn’t witness the tiny apartment with its peeling wallpaper and cheap furniture, couldn’t see the exhaustion so heavy it felt like it was part of her bones.

His jaw tightened. Just barely. If she hadn’t spent two years studying his face, learning every micro-expression, she wouldn’t have noticed. But she had. And she did.

“This isn’t a social call,” he said. “I have a business proposition.”

“I’m not interested.”

“You haven’t heard it yet.”

“I don’t need to.” She moved to close the door.

His hand caught it—gently, not forcefully, just enough to stop it shutting. “Your sister is sick.”

Her whole body went cold. “Don’t.”

“Maya Castellano. Stage Three lymphoma, UCSF Medical Centre. The recommended course: an experimental protocol in Switzerland. Cost: five hundred thousand dollars. Insurance refused coverage three times.”

Selene had the urge to slam the door right in his face—to shut out his perfect suit, his perfect words, his perfect knowledge of just how badly things had gone. “Get away from me.”

“I can help.”

“I don’t want your help.” But her voice cracked on the last word, betraying her. Showed him the desperation she’d been trying so hard to hide from everyone, including herself.

“I need a wife.” He said it like he was ordering coffee. Casual. Transactional. “My grandmother died, and her will has a clause. I have to marry you within thirty days, or I forfeit my inheritance to my uncle Marcus.”

Selene stared at him. “You’re insane.”

“I’m practical. Marcus will destroy everything my grandmother built. He’ll dismantle the company, fire 4,000 people, and end the charitable foundation. I need to marry you, and you also need money for your sister’s treatment. We can help each other.”

“You want to marry me for an inheritance.” It sounded foolish when I said it out loud.

“I want to fulfil my grandmother’s last wish and prevent a corporate vulture from destroying her legacy. You want to save your sister’s life. Our motivations align.”

The thing was, he wasn’t wrong. Standing there in her doorway, looking at her with those green eyes that once saw her as something more than a transaction, he was offering exactly what she needed. Financial salvation. Maya’s chance at survival.

All it would cost was marrying the man whose baby she’d lost alone in a hospital ten years ago.

The man whose mother had threatened to destroy his entire future if Selene didn’t disappear.

The man she’d loved so much it had felt like breathing, until the day it felt like drowning.

“How much?” The words tasted like ash.

“Two hundred thousand. Plus a one-year commitment. After that, we divorced. Clean break. You go your way, I go mine.”

Two hundred thousand wouldn’t cover everything. The Swiss protocol was 500,000. But it would buy time, pay down enough debt that she could breathe, maybe even get Maya into the trial.

“Two hundred and fifty,” Selene heard herself say. “And I want it upfront.”

Something flickered in his expression. Surprise, maybe or respect. Hard to tell with all that armour he’d built.

“Done.”

Her neighbour’s television blared through the wall. Judge Judy was really upset now.

Selene looked at Avalon Pierce, at the boy she’d loved who’d become a stranger wearing his face. At the man offering her a devil’s bargain wrapped in Italian wool.

“When?” she asked.

We meet tomorrow, you know, to iron out the details and sign contracts. We have four weeks to make this look convincing.”

“And after a year?”

“After a year, we’re strangers again. Like we should have stayed.”

The cruelty of it was almost elegant. He blamed her, of course, he did. She’d disappeared without explanation, ghosted him so thoroughly he probably thought she’d never cared at all.

If only he knew.

Or should she tell him.

Catherine Pierce’s voice still echoed in her memory: *If you tell him about this baby, I will destroy him. Every trust fund, every opportunity, every door that’s opened for him because of this family—gone, and it will be your fault.*

So she left, and kept leaving, every day for ten years.

“Okay,” Selene said. “Tomorrow. Where?”

He named a dive bar three blocks from her apartment. Neutral ground and public enough to be safe, private enough to discuss terms.

“Seven PM,” he said.

“Seven PM,” she agreed.

Avalon turned to leave, then paused. “Selene.”

She looked up.

“Whatever happened between us,” he said quietly, “stays in the past. This is business and nothing more.”

“I understand.”

He left. She closed the door. Leaned against it until her legs remembered how to hold her weight.

Through the thin wall, Judge Judy rendered her verdict with absolute certainty.

Selene looked at the bills covering her table, at the calculator that had given up trying to make the numbers work, at her phone, lighting up with tomorrow’s shift request.

She thought about Maya in that hospital bed, laughing through the nausea, joking with the nurses, being so goddamn brave that Selene wanted to scream.

She thought about Avalon’s face, about the armour in his eyes.

And she thought about the baby she’d named Elena, after his grandmother, even though he’d never known she existed.

Tomorrow, she’d sell her soul to save her sister.

Tonight, she’d let her tears drop until they can't anymore