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Lahat ng Kabanata ng Tempting The Billioanire : Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 97

97 Kabanata

Chapter 90

Emily's POVThe Karen verdict came on a Tuesday.I was at the financial services firm when Sarah Mitchell called — the third week of February, mid-morning, the particular quiet of a client office where I had been given a desk for the duration of the engagement and had been working through the original founding documents, the earliest communications, the language that had been laid down before anyone thought about scale or acquisition or the flattening that came from trying to be too many things to too many people.I saw Sarah's name on the phone and stepped out into the corridor."The verdict came this morning," she said. Without preamble, in the way she delivered information, clean and direct. "Guilty on the primary count. Child abduction. Guilty on two secondary counts, fraud and falsification of records in connection with the placement." A pause. "Sentencing in six weeks."I stood in the corridor of the financial services firm with the grey February light coming through the window

Chapter 91

Emily's POVThe weeks between the verdict and March had a particular quality.Not the waiting quality — the forward-moving quality of someone who knew what was coming and was moving toward it without urgency, the comfortable approach of a thing that was already decided and simply needed time to arrive. The Karen sentencing was scheduled for the week after Anna's visit, which felt, as Anna had said, correct. The legal chapter closing after the personal one had begun its next movement.March was six weeks away when the verdict came.It was three weeks away by the time February found its pace again.The financial services firm work was deepening. I had moved past the archaeology phase and into the reconstruction — the careful work of taking what the excavation had found and building the new language from the recovered true thing rather than from invention. The CEO had been in three of the last four sessions, which was not something I had asked for but which was, I had decided, exactly ri

Chapter 92

Emily's POVAnna arrived on a Thursday evening in the second week of March.I picked her up from the airport alone. Alexander had offered — the same offer he had made for Catherine, the generosity of a man who understood that arrivals mattered and wanted to contribute to them — and I had said yes this time, come with me. He had driven while I sat in the passenger seat and watched the freeway doing its evening thing, the particular Los Angeles rush hour that moved in its own logic, stopping and releasing in patterns that felt random but probably weren't.We parked in the arrivals structure and waited by the doors.Anna came through at seven forty-three. I saw her before she saw us — the dark coat, the single carry-on, the self-contained quality of her movement through a crowd. She was looking at her phone and then she looked up and found us and her face did the thing it did when something landed — the brief adjustment, the composed receiving."You brought Alexander," she said."He wante

Chapter 93

Emily's POVWe drove to Cheviot Hills at one-thirty.The March afternoon was doing what I had promised — the first real warmth of the year, the kind that arrived in the second week of March in Los Angeles and announced that the season had genuinely changed, not the provisional warmth of a February afternoon that might be retracted by evening but the committed warmth of a year that had decided to move forward.Anna sat in the passenger seat and looked at the city as we drove. She had the window down slightly — the particular preference of someone who wanted the actual air rather than the conditioned version of it. Her hair moved in the draft. She was looking at the residential streets as we moved through them, the particular neighbourhoods of the west side, the way the houses changed character between areas, the visual grammar of a city that had grown in pieces and kept the seams."Los Angeles makes more sense from a car than from on foot," she said."Most people say the opposite," I sa

Chapter 94

Emily's POVThe second day of Anna's visit was a Saturday.My parents had planned nothing and everything — the particular preparation of people who had learned, through the year, that the best container for significant things was the ordinary. Not an itinerary. Not a programme of activities designed to make the time feel full. Just the house and the garden and the kitchen and whatever the day decided to be.Alexander came.I had asked him the night before, lying in the penthouse bedroom with the March dark outside and the city doing its quiet late version of itself."Tomorrow," I said. "Cheviot Hills. Would you come?"He had been reading. He put the book down and looked at me."You want me there," he said."I want Anna to meet you properly," I said. "Not the airport. Not a drop-off. Actually meet you." I paused. "She knows about you the way I know about people I've heard described for months. She has a picture. I want her to have the person.""And your parents?" he said."They want you

Chapter 95

Emily's POVSunday was the day Anna had asked for.Not at Cheviot Hills — just the two of us, as she had said when she confirmed the visit. The ordinary time, the time where nothing particular was happening. She had said she wanted to see the consultancy on Friday, which she had. She had said she wanted the garden on Saturday, which she had received beyond what she had anticipated. Sunday, she had said, I want with you.I had been thinking about what Sunday should be since the visit was confirmed.Not an itinerary — she had been explicit about not wanting that. But a shape. The right shape for a day between two people who were still learning each other in the ordinary way, the accumulation of hours and observations and small exchanges that built a relationship into something durable.I had decided on walking.Los Angeles was a city that revealed itself differently at walking pace than at the car pace that most people used — the pace at which you caught the scale but missed the detail.

Epilogue

Emily's POVJune came the way June came in Los Angeles — not suddenly, not with announcement, but as the natural arrival of something that had always been coming, the warmth deepening from the provisional into the committed, the city settling into the version of itself that it wore for the long months of summer.The roses on the back wall at Cheviot Hills were extraordinary.Anna had said they would be. She had looked at the trained canes in March and said: in June that wall will be extraordinary, with the certainty of someone reading a visual language they understood. She had been right. My mother had sent photographs in the last week of May — the buds swelling, the first blooms opening — and Anna had sent back: I'm coming on the fourteenth. I already have the flights.She came on the fourteenth.I picked her up from the airport. She came through the arrivals door with the carry-on and the dark coat she didn't need because it was June and looked at me with the ease of someone arrivin

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