Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Billionaire's Silent Wife No More: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

Park walked in and sat down and started talking about the pharmaceutical figures, and I listened, and I asked the right questions, and somewhere in the middle of it I realised I had absolutely no idea what he had said for the last four minutes.“Sorry,” I said. “Run that last part again.”Park looked at me. He wasn’t the kind of man who made a thing of moments like that, which I appreciated. He just went back three sentences and repeated himself without any change in expression, and I focused properly this time, and we got through the meeting, and when he left I sat back in my chair and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.Jason had tried.Eight months in, twenty nine years old, gone to my father hat in hand, and my father had sent him away with she’s fine, and Jason had believed him because it was easier than pushing at something he didn’t know how to fix, and I had spent the next two years and four months disappearing inside a marriage that might have been different if one

Jason arrived in fifty three minutes.I know because I looked at the clock when Clara knocked and said he was downstairs, and then looked at it again when he walked through my office door, and the seven minutes between those two things were the longest seven minutes of the morning.He walked in wearing a dark coat over a grey shirt, no tie, and he looked like a man who had left wherever he was the moment he hung up the phone and hadn’t stopped moving since. He was carrying a black folder, thick, held against his side like it was something he had been protecting for a long time.He looked at me.I looked at him.Clara closed the door behind him without being asked.“Sit down,” I said.He sat. He put the folder on the desk between us and looked at it for a second before looking back at me.“Six months ago,” he said, “I found out my father had been making payments to a private investment group through a subsidiary account I wasn’t supposed to know existed. I started pulling the thread, an

To who.That question sat with me the whole ride home. I kept turning it over, kept looking at it from different angles, and every angle led me back to the same place. My father had looked me in the eye this morning at that kitchen table. He had answered every question I asked him. He had said yes when I asked if there was anything else he was hiding.And he had said nothing about a transfer.I told the driver to turn around.The building was quiet when I walked back in. Just the night security, and the hum of the elevator, and my own footsteps on the marble floor. I went straight to my office, turned on the desk lamp, opened the laptop, and went into the secure server.The 1987 files were larger than I remembered.I had skimmed them last week because my father had said the intelligence operation was being wound down, and I had moved on. I had believed him the way I had been believing things from him all week, carefully, partially, with the specific hope of a daughter who just came hom

The driver moved fast.I sat forward in the seat the whole way, phone in my hand, watching the minutes tick by. Eleven minutes to the Vanguard Group building from where we were. Eleven minutes felt like an eternity when someone had just told me Jason had maybe an hour.I called Leo first.He picked up on the third ring sounding groggy, which meant he had been asleep, which meant he wasn’t at the office, which meant Jason was alone.“Leo,” I said. “Is Jason at the office right now.”A pause. The sound of him sitting up.“What? Yeah, he said he was going back in after dinner to finish some things. Why, what’s.”“Call him right now,” I said. “Tell him to leave the building immediately. Don’t tell him why. Just get him out.”“Sarah what’s happening.”“Call him, Leo. Right now while I’m on the line.”I heard Leo fumbling with his phone, putting me on hold, calling Jason. The car moved through the streets and I watched the building getting closer in the distance, that familiar Vanguard Group

We have time.I looked at the photograph in my hand and thought about what time actually meant in this context.Twenty two years of it.My mother alive somewhere warm for twenty two years while I visited a grave in the rain and held my father’s hand and believed the world had ended.That wasn’t time.That was theft.“Where was this taken,” I said.“Portugal,” Victoria said. “A small town outside Lisbon. She’s been there eleven years. Before that she moved around. Spain. Italy. Morocco for a while.”She paused.“Your father made it difficult for her to stay anywhere too long in the early years. She got better at disappearing.”I looked at the photograph again.My mother at a table outside somewhere warm.A coffee cup in front of her.Hair silver now. Shorter than in the photographs my father kept in the study. The ones I had grown up looking at on the days the missing felt unbearable.She wasn’t looking at the camera.Just a woman sitting outside in the sun. Alive. Completely unaware sh