All Chapters of The Billionaire’s unknown Heir: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Lucas was still laughing in the corridor when I finally went to bed that night.I fell asleep with the spider quote still on my phone screen and woke up the next morningto forty-seven new notifications, all variations of the same thing. People had found it funny.People had found it humanizing. People had, apparently, needed a seven-year-old’s opinionon spiders more than anyone had anticipated. I put my phone face down and made coffee.The weekend after the press storm was the quietest I had experienced since arriving in NewYork. Not empty. Just quiet. The particular quiet of something that has been making enormousnoise for a long time and has finally run out of momentum.Ethan went to see Noah on Saturday and came back with a detailed account of a structuralengineering debate I only half followed but enjoyed enormously. I answered emails. I satwith cold coffee and thought about nothing in particular.Margaret’s message came on Monday morning.Not a summons, exactly. That was th

I stayed with Ethan until he fell asleep that night, his engineering book still open on thepillow beside him, his hand loosely curled around his pencil the way it always is when hehas been mid-thought and sleep arrived before the thought finished.I turned off his lamp and stood in the doorway for a moment. The hotel suite was quiet.The city outside was doing its late evening thing, all light and movement, completelyunbothered. I thought about Noah in his room somewhere across the city, also probablynot asleep, also probably thinking. Two boys on the same night sitting with the same weightin different rooms.Noah took four days to decide.I know because Adrian told me, and Adrian knew because Noah told him, which was itselfa sign of something. A few months ago Noah had not been the kind of child who reportedhis internal processes to the adults around him. He had been the kind who processed aloneand emerged with conclusions already formed. The fact that he was narrating his th

He came within twenty minutes.I heard him before I saw him, the particular sound of Adrian moving through a buildinghe owns, purposeful without being loud, the kind of presence that registers in a roombefore the person arrives. He pushed open the conference room door and looked at meacross the table, and whatever was on my face told him immediately that this was not aroutine matter because he closed the door behind him without being asked and sat down.“Show me,” he said.I turned my laptop toward him and pulled up the EB Holdings documentation in the sequenceI had traced it. The fund itself first, its six-year performance record, its consistent management,the quiet profitability of something that had been tended carefully and without attention. Thenthe registration documents. Whitmore’s name as registered manager. Then the original seedinvestment records, layer by layer, leading back through the holding structure to the nameat the beginning of it.Thomas Blackwood.Adrian r

I was still sitting with that thought the next morning when Ethan came to find me in thekitchen, already dressed, school bag over one shoulder, with the particular energy of achild who has something planned and is waiting for the adults to catch up.“Noah’s coming this afternoon,” he said. Not a question. A statement of confirmed fact.“Is he?” I said.“I told him he could. We’re building something.” He looked at me with the expression ofsomeone who has already worked out that parental approval is essentially a formality atthis point but is going through the motions out of courtesy. “Is that okay?”“Of course it’s okay,” I said.He picked up a piece of toast and left for school, satisfied.Noah arrived at three fifteen with his school bag and a paper bag from a specialistengineering supply shop that I was slightly concerned was going to become a recurringexpense. Inside the bag was a structural construction kit, the kind with interchangeablejoints and cables and small weighted

I put the phone down after Adrian’s call and sat at the kitchen table for a moment withthe quiet of it. Something worth building. Yes. I thought that was exactly right.The preliminary hearing was on Thursday. Which meant Wednesday evening was the lastquiet evening before it, and I had been thinking about that all day, the specific weight ofa night before something important.Adrian had texted an hour later: “You’ll be fine. You’ve been preparing for this for sevenmonths without knowing it.” Which was, I thought, one of the more accurate things anyonehad said to me in a while.Ethan was at Noah’s for the afternoon, having gone over after school to work on the bridgejoint, and the hotel suite was quiet in a way that should have felt like an opportunity toprepare. Instead I made dinner, ate it at the kitchentable, read forty pages of a novel I had been ignoring for three months, and went to bedat ten fifteen.Lucas called at ten thirty. “Are you sleeping?”“Trying to,” I said.