All Chapters of Billionaire Contract Marriage: Her Quest : Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

Sophia's POVIsabella's daughter was three years old.Her name was Catherine.Not at my suggestion. Not at anyone's suggestion. Isabella had called from the hospital the morning after the birth with the specific quality of someone who had made a decision that was entirely settled and was simply sharing it."Her name is Catherine," she'd said.David had been beside me. We'd been in the car on the way. I'd put the phone on speaker without thinking.The silence in the car lasted exactly three seconds.Then David said: "That's right."That was all.That was everything.---Catherine was three in October.She had Isabella's directness and her father James's easy warmth and the particular combination of these qualities produced someone who walked into rooms and immediately identified the most interesting thing in them and went toward it without hesitation.She was currently in the garden.I watched her from the kitchen window. The September morning, the roses still holding their late-season

Sophia's POVThe board meeting was on a Thursday in February.I sat at the back of the room.Not at the head of the table where I'd sat for twenty years of foundation board meetings. At the back. In the chair against the wall that was technically for observers and had never, in the foundation's history, been occupied by me.Claudia had asked me to come."Not to present," she'd said. "Not to speak unless I ask you to. Just to be there.""Why?"She'd considered the question with the precision she brought to everything. "Because you built this. And I'm about to do something significant with it. And I want you to see it from the beginning."I'd sat at the back without argument.---The room was the London center's board room. The one with the window that looked onto the garden — a small urban garden, nothing like ours at home, but tended carefully by the center's staff and the families who used the space.Twelve board members. Dr. Adeyemi at the head. Claudia at the presentation position,

David's POVI drove to Vermont alone in May.Not because Sophia couldn't come. She'd offered. The children had offered. But some conversations needed the specific conditions of two people who had known each other long enough that the pretenses were unnecessary and the silence was functional and you could simply sit in a room together and say the things that had been waiting to be said.Mr. Thomas and I had that.We'd been building it for twenty-five years without naming it. Which was, I'd come to understand, exactly how it was supposed to work. The things that mattered most between people rarely announced themselves. They accumulated. Visit by visit, phone call by phone call, the occasional letter he still wrote by hand in the specific cursive of someone who had learned to write when handwriting meant something.I'd kept every letter.He was eighty-one now.The Vermont property had aged with him in the way of places that were well-loved rather than well-maintained. The garden slightly

Sophia's POVIt happened after dinner.The way the important things often happened. Not arranged. Not planned. Just the natural settling of a long day into its final quality, the children quieter, the adults looser, the garden holding the last of the August light in the specific way of evenings that didn't want to end.We were on the porch. Most of us. The younger children had been put to bed by their parents with the usual negotiations and the eventual victories of exhaustion over protest. Catherine had gone down with unusual cooperation, which Isabella said meant she'd been running entirely on will for the last two hours and had simply run out.That left the rest of us.Nora and William side by side on the porch steps. Alex's colleagues had driven back to the city after dinner, leaving Alex himself in the chair beside Mr. Thomas with the ease of two people who had always understood each other. Claudia on the bench with her journal finally open, writing in the soft evening light. Emm

Sophia's POVOctober arrived the way it always did.Without asking. With the particular quality of a month that had decided what it was going to be and committed fully. The light changing angle. The roses finished now, the bed cut back for winter, the garden entering its resting state with the patience of things that understood the value of restoration.I was fifty-eight years old.I'd been noting this with a kind of quiet attention all year. Not dread. Not the inventory-taking of someone measuring what had been lost to time. Something closer to recognition. The specific acknowledgment of having arrived somewhere that had seemed, from earlier vantage points, impossibly distant.Fifty-eight.My parents hadn't reached it.I sat with that on the morning of my birthday. Not in grief. In something more complex. The specific texture of a life that had exceeded what was taken. That had gone further than the people who made it. That carried them into territory they hadn't been given.I was fi