All Chapters of The Billionaire's Runaway Country Girl : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

33 Chapters

Chapter Eleven

Jules' POVIt rained the day we buried Nana, which felt like the most Nana thing that could have happened.She would have said the sky was crying along, and she would have said it without irony, with genuine tenderness for the idea of a weeping world. She would have made everyone tea afterward and told them the rain was a blessing. I stood at the graveside in my good coat — the one I'd had for six years, the hem slightly frayed — and I let the rain hit the top of my head because I'd forgotten an umbrella and it seemed like a small punishment I deserved for not doing a hundred things differently.Pastor Graham gave a beautiful eulogy. He talked about her laugh and her chocolate chip cookies and the way she could make anyone feel like the most important person in any room. Three farmhands came. The Bailin family came. Old Mae from the general store. A woman I didn't recognize who turned out to have been in Nana's Bible study for twenty years.They all said the right things to me after.

Chapter Twelve

Adam's POVHe quit on a Tuesday.It was a deliberate choice, the way most of his worst decisions were — not impulsive, not emotional, just a logical conclusion he'd arrived at after a period of very controlled, very quiet internal devastation. He sat at his desk at the museum for the last time on a Tuesday morning in October, looked at the Byzantine manuscript he'd been cataloging for three weeks, and understood with sudden and complete clarity that he did not care about it at all.He had never not cared about it before. That was the thing.For twelve years, the work had been the point. The museum, the archiving, the particular pleasure of handling something centuries old and knowing its story — it had been the only inheritance he'd wanted from his mother, who had curated the medieval collection here for twenty years before she died. He'd taken the job six months after her funeral and he'd never once regretted it. It was the thing that made him feel like a person rather than a corpora

Chapter Thirteen

Jules' POVI picked the city by accident.I had the map app open on my phone, zoomed out until the whole country was a thumbnail, and I pressed my finger down without looking. When I looked, it landed on Millhaven — a mid-sized city in the northwest I had driven through exactly once on a trip to see a college friend. I remembered a river. I remembered a bookshop with a green door.I took it as a sign. Nana would have approved of the methodology.The drive took two days. I stopped overnight at a highway motel and ate vending machine crackers and a convenience store apple and felt, the whole time, that I was driving away from one life and hadn't yet arrived at the next one. The space in between was just highway and radio static and the steady, ordinary miracle of the baby growing without asking my permission.I was fourteen weeks by then. Showing, barely, but enough that I'd had to let out the waistband on my jeans. I talked to the bump in the car the way I'd been talking to it since th

Chapter Fourteen

Jules' POVHe arrived at 4:17 in the morning on a Wednesday in April.It was raining, which again felt appropriate. I had been awake since midnight — not in pain, or not only in pain, but in the grip of a feeling I couldn't name, something between anticipation and a kind of grief I didn't understand. Like I was at the edge of something enormous and could feel the air pressure changing.Madeline drove me. She had made me promise weeks ago that I would knock on her door no matter the hour, and I had knocked at 12:30 AM and she had been awake, already in her coat, like she'd been waiting."You timed this terribly," she said, starting the car."Noted.""I have a parent-teacher conference at eight AM.""Madeline.""I'm coming, I'm coming. Breathe."Labor is the kind of thing no one can actually describe to you. You can read about it, you can watch videos, you can have a doula explain every stage with a calm that will seem completely detached from reality when you're actually in it — and no

Chapter Fifteen

Adam's POVTHREE YEARS LATER.He found the boy on a Tuesday night.Adam had been in Millhaven for forty-eight hours on business — an acquisition his team had been brokering for six months, a small tech firm with a patent portfolio they needed. He wasn't required to be here in person; he rarely was, at this stage. But he had needed to be somewhere that wasn't his apartment, and he had needed the noise in his head to have somewhere to go, so he'd come.He'd been walking for forty minutes. It was past eleven. The city had that particular late-night quality of being awake but not for anything good — a few bars spilling light onto sidewalks, the odd taxi, a couple walking a dog. He had been in the kind of mood that was not quite sadness, not quite its absence. Just a flatness he'd been carrying around for so long now he'd stopped noticing it except on nights like this, when there was nothing to do and nowhere to be and it sat right at the front of him.He almost walked past the small figur

Chapter Sixteen

Jules' POVThe first thing I thought was: of course.Because the universe had a particular sense of humor, or Nana was operating some celestial intervention, or I simply had the worst luck of any person alive — but whatever the reason, the man standing in my apartment doorway at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday in Millhaven, in a coat that cost more than my furniture, with my son's curls and my son's jaw and my son's mouth shaped into a kind of stunned, careful recognition, was the last person I would have chosen to find here and the only person I had been, in some locked and walled-off part of myself, waiting for.Three years. Three years of building something. Three years of making Eli's daycare lunches and editing manuscripts and cooking dinner for Madeline on Thursdays and not falling apart. Three years of not googling him, not calling Cooper, not writing to the number on the card that I kept in the kitchen drawer under the takeout menus like a secret I hadn't decided what to do with ye

Chapter Seventeen

Adam's POVThe hospital was twenty minutes from his hotel.He drove it in fifteen.Cooper had called at 11:52 PM, fifteen minutes after Adam had walked away from a hallway in Millhaven that had turned the world sideways, and he had said: Henry is asking for you. He's in the ICU at St. Catherine's. They're saying tonight. Adam, he won't let them sedate him until he sees you.Adam had not said anything for a long moment.I know, Cooper had said. Come anyway.Henry Shepherd had been Adam's father the way a building can be a home — technically correct, structurally present, and fundamentally cold. He had entered Adam's mother's life when Adam was six, married her when Adam was eight, buried her when Adam was twenty-two, and spent the intervening years oscillating between competent stepfather and remote stranger depending on the season. Adam had not hated him. He had also not loved him. He had categorized him, the way he categorized most things he didn't know how to feel about, and moved o

Chapter Eighteen

Adam's POVHe called Cooper at 4:30 AM from the hospital parking lot."Find out about the boy," he said. No preamble. "Jules's son. His full name, his date of birth. Everything. Now."A pause on Cooper's end. Not a surprised pause. The pause of someone who has known something for a while and has been waiting for the right moment."Cooper.""Eli Thomas Arthur," Cooper said. "Born April 14th. He'll be three this spring."Silence."You already have the file," Adam said."I've had it since shortly after he was born."Adam stood very still in the parking lot. A car moved past on the street. Somewhere, a bird that had mistaken the streetlights for morning. "You knew. You knew and you didn't tell me.""You told me you didn't want to hear her name." Cooper's voice was careful but unapologetic. "You were very clear about that. And I had no proof yet of the photos being falsified. All I had was a feeling. A feeling doesn't override an instruction.""How long did it take you to get more than a f

Chapter Nineteen

Jules' POVI knew the moment I opened the door.I knew from the way he stood — not the confident, unhurried way he used to stand, like the world could wait — but like a man bracing for something. Like a man who had sat up all night doing the math and had arrived at an answer that had broken something open in him and he was trying to hold the pieces together long enough to get through this conversation.He had been crying. Not now — now he was controlled, the way he always was when it counted — but recently. I could see it in the set of his eyes, in the slight rawness at the edges. Adam Casey, who I had never once in all the time I'd known him seen lose composure completely, had at some point in the last few hours sat somewhere and cried.Good, some small, mean part of me thought.And then, immediately: no. Stop.I stepped back from the door. Let him in but only into the entryway, not further — Eli was in the kitchen with Madeline, having cereal, and I was not doing this anywhere near

Chapter Twenty

Elena's POVThe news reached her the way all important news reached Elena Voss — through a photograph.It was a social media post. A woman named Carla, one of Adam's distant associates, had uploaded it from a charity gala three nights ago. Three photos in the carousel, the last of which stopped Elena's thumb mid-scroll. Adam. Outdoors somewhere. A picnic table by the look of it, and a small dark-haired boy in his lap pointing at something off-camera with the imperious certainty of a child who has decided everything is interesting. Adam was looking down at the child with an expression Elena had never seen on his face before, not in fourteen months of knowing him, not in a single unguarded moment she had managed to catch him in. He looked soft. He looked like a man who had found the thing he had been walking toward without knowing it.She put her phone face-down on the marble kitchen island and stood very still for thirty-two seconds.Then she turned it back over and looked at the boy a

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