Todos los capítulos de The Billionaire Next door (Who I Hate): Capítulo 61 - Capítulo 70

KATE'S POVLeon pulled over before I could give the driver the address.Not aggressively. Just firmly, the car finding the kerb with a quiet certainty that said this conversation was happening before we went another metre in any direction.He turned to look at me."No," he said."I haven't said yes yet.""You were about to."He wasn't wrong.I held the phone against my chest and looked at him properly. He was doing the controlled thing, the jaw set, the expression measured, all the familiar architecture of Leon Romano keeping himself functional when his instinct was running somewhere else entirely. But underneath it something was showing that the architecture wasn't quite covering.Not anger. Something closer to fear.I'd seen it twice before tonight. Both times it had been about me specifically."He said alone," I said."I heard what he said.""If I bring you he won't give me whatever he has.""You don't know what he has.""He said it belongs to me more than anyone else," I said. "Le

KATE'S POVLeon showed me the photograph in the corridor outside the room.I looked at it for a moment. Natalie Smith walking into a police station at whatever hour this was, alone, no lawyers visible, no family, no carefully arranged media presence to frame the narrative before it happened.Just her. Moving through a door."She sent the three words," I said. "Check on Allison. That was her.""Yes," Leon said."She knew Allison was locked in that room and she told us before she walked in there." I looked at the photograph again. "She drew a line.""Two lines tonight," Leon said. "Carter and Allison."I handed the phone back.Thought about Natalie Smith the way I'd thought about her all week, through the lens of everything she'd done, the press conference, the messages, the carefully coordinated damage she'd aimed at Leon's name and the Romano family and by extension at me. All of it real. All of it deliberate.And still.Two lines.People were never just one thing. I'd been learning t

KATE'S POVI watched Leon read it.His expression moved through two or three things before settling into something I didn't have a clean name for. Not shock. Something quieter and more permanent than shock.He handed the phone back.I read it again even though I'd already memorised it.Kate. I'm leaving today. I've arranged everything quietly and I won't be coming back, not to Los Angeles, not to the estate, not to any of it. I want you to know that what I did when you were born was the worst decision of my life. Not because it unraveled. Because of what it cost you specifically. Every year of distance. Every time I held back when I should have held on. I told myself I was protecting you from the truth but I think I was protecting myself from having to live inside it fully. You deserved better than the mother I was. I can't undo that. I can only stop adding to it. There is money in an account in your name. Not Romano money. Mine. Saved over thirty years of working in that house. It be

KATE'S POVI said yes before I'd fully thought it through.Not impulsively. Just — the answer was already there before the thinking caught up to it. Justin had asked for me specifically and that meant something. Not because of who I was biologically or legally or in any of the ways that had been debated and documented and argued over for the past week.Because of who I was to him.The person who had sat across from him in a small house in Pasadena and heard his mother's name said out loud for the first time in a room that had something like power in it.That was enough.Leon didn't say anything when I told Bryan yes. He just nodded once, that small economy of movement that I'd learned to read as acceptance rather than agreement. He didn't have to agree. He just had to not stand in front of it.He didn't.Bryan made calls. Things were arranged. The two hours became one and a half by the time we got moving.Justin had chosen a neutral venue.Not the Romano estate. Not anywhere connected

KATE'S POVI stared at Leon."Justin posted Carter's bail," I said.Not a question. Just saying it out loud because sometimes that was the only way to find out if something was as strange as it sounded inside your head.It was.Leon showed me the message. Carter's counsel. The name on the documentation clear and unambiguous. Justin Roberts. The same Justin who had stood at that microphone twenty minutes ago and said his mother's name with the specific quiet fury of someone who had been waiting his whole life to say it publicly.The same Justin who had looked Carter Romano in the eye last night and said I don't forgive you."Why," I said.Leon put the phone in his pocket. "I don't know."We both looked across the emptying conference room to where Justin was speaking to a journalist near the door, unhurried, finishing a conversation while the room cleared around him.He didn't look like someone who had just done something unexpected.He looked exactly the same as he had all morning.Whe