All Chapters of Four Babies and a Billion Dollar Lie: Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

The PerformanceThe morning sun poured through Marcus’s mansion windows, golden and unbothered by the chaos that lived inside its walls.Marcus stood by the edge of his office table, jaw tight, voice slicing through the silence like a whip.“Tessa, I don’t care if Dorcas is pregnant, or Chloe, or the entire damn neighborhood is walking around with swollen bellies,” he snapped, slamming his palm against the desk. “That’s not your problem, you hear me?”Tessa stood a few feet away, her hands clasped together in front of her, eyes lowered like a child being scolded by a furious parent. Her chest rose and fell, slow and shaky.Marcus paced back and forth, his voice rising. “You have one job. Just one. Make Ares and Lady Bianca jealous. Make noise. Be creative about it. Don’t just sit around crying and waiting for miracles. This isn’t Sunday school!”Tessa’s lips trembled. “I—I’ve been trying,” she said quietly.“Make him look!” Marcus barked, cutting her off. “You have to pull his attenti

The midnight visitorThe night felt different. Heavy, thick. Like the air was holding its breath. Richard stood in his living room, staring at the wall clock ticking too loudly above the mantel. Midnight. He should have been asleep, but sleep hadn’t come easily since he walked into the police station earlier that day and did what he never imagined he would do.He betrayed Ethan. He kept pacing. His mind was a storm of guilt, anxiety, and the memory of Tessa’s terrified eyes. He had convinced himself he did the right thing, that Ethan had become too dangerous, too unpredictable, too close to destroying everything around her.But now…now he felt something shifting in the air around him. A tension. A warning. His phone buzzed on the coffee table.UNKNOWN NUMBER: “They escaped. Ethan is gone.”Richard froze.His heart punched against his ribs. His eyes skimmed the words again. They escaped. Not he escaped.“They”…?He swallowed hard, whispering into the empty room:“What do you mean… they

Offed her!The Morning the Street Stood Still. Tessa woke to a silence so loud it thrummed behind her ears. The kind of silence that presses against your chest and makes each breath feel like it must be earned.For a moment she lay still, fingers threaded through the soft cotton of the bedspread, trying to convince herself the quiet was ordinary, the hush of a weekend morning, the calm before errands and calls and the small rehearsed dramas of her life. But the quiet did not feel ordinary. It felt like the pause before something broke.She dressed without looking into the mirror, fastening the last button of a blouse she had chosen for no reason other than it made her feel steadier. When she stepped out onto the balcony that overlooked the street, the view that met her should have been a normal one, vendors setting up, a dog walker hurrying by, a taxi glinting under the early sun. Instead, the street had become a tableau of motion and alarm: clusters of people gathered in tight, unea

Lila’s Camera GuyWhen the television in the corner of Jude’s tiny studio flickered on that morning, it was supposed to be background noise, a familiar thrum that filled the spaces between his tasks. He had a job to do: three hours of footage to transcode, a client call in forty-five minutes, and a voicemail from Lila that had gone unanswered overnight. The kettle hissed. The apartment smelled faintly of burnt coffee and leftover pizza. Outside his window, the city began to rouse, a muffled collage of engines and shout and a gull’s lonely cry.He hardly expected to sit down.Then the bulletin interrupted the morning news: BREAKING — WOMAN SHOT DEAD ON MULBERRY STREET.The anchor’s voice was flat, professional, insufficient for the gravity of the image that followed. A grainy clip from a traffic camera, shaky, almost useless as evidence, but good enough to show the broken body on the pavement, a yellow smear of cordoned tape, police lights painting the bricks blue and red.The reporte

Domestic ViolenceTessa stared at the ceiling until the plaster blurred into a pale, forgiving sky. The room around her felt unreal, the soft drape of the curtains, the expensive rug, the photographs framed just so on the dresser, all of it seemed like props on a stage for a life she did not recognize as her own.Her palms were damp; her breath came in shallow bursts. The weight settling on her chest wasn’t grief alone. It was bewilderment, a furious, hollowed out sort of sorrow that left her raw and trembling.Chloe was dead.She kept saying the words to herself in whispers, as if saying them louder would make them heavier, more permanent. Chloe — sharp tongued, reckless Chloe, the woman who had been her rival and, at times, the only person who had understood the reckless loneliness that lived beneath Tessa’s composed surface.They had fought like cats. They had laughed like thieves. Ten years ago, Tessa might have called her a foe; last year she would have called her a friend. Now t