All Chapters of Love, Lies, and a Billionaire's Regret : Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

147 Chapters

131: Camille

PENELOPE "Where is she?" Adrian asked as he was already pulling on his coat. His assistant pointed at the phone. "She said she would be at the Cheng Capital offices. The old ones. She still has keys from when you two were together." Adrian looked at me. "Stay here," he ordered. "Absolutely not. There's no way you expect me to stay here and do nothing." He didn't let the argument escalate, so we left together. *** The Cheng Capital offices sat in Canary Wharf on the forty-second floor. It was a building that still bore Adrian's name on the directory, even though he no longer ran what lived inside it. The receptionist looked visibly uncomfortable. "She's in the main boardroom," she said. "She says she has a right to be here. Her lawyers confirmed she has a shareholder claim." Adrian walked past her without stopping. And I walked with him to the lift to the forty-second floor. There was a corridor lined with floor-to-ceiling glass, the city spread out below. He pushed open th

132: Marcus

Marcus's POV The studio was smaller than I'd expected. It was just a converted room above a café in Bermondsey. It had two microphones. Foam padding on the walls. The host, Dan, had 200,000 subscribers and had been perfectly pleasant during our pre-recording chat. Now he was looking at me, having realized a story had grown bigger than he had planned for. "You understand this will go out to a wide audience," he said. "Yes. That's why I chose you." "You could have gone to a newspaper." "Newspapers edit. Podcasts don't." I slammed. He glanced down at his notes. I had been out for three weeks by then. Three weeks in a small flat in Peckham that still smelled like whoever had lived there before me. Three weeks of learning that the world hadn't waited for me, and that it had rearranged itself into shapes I no longer recognized. I had read my second interview while still in prison. Well...I had read the first one, really. The journalist had painted me as the man who wanted

133: She came

Marcus's POVShe arrived in less than an hour, which meant that she left before she even called me.I heard footsteps on the stairs, with no hesitation at the landing. She had looked up the address, confirmed the floor, and come straight up.I opened the door at her arrival, and she was smaller than I expected, nothing I had remembered all these years. Up close, she was just a woman in a dark coat with her hair pulled back, wearing an expression with no performance in it at all.Then she walked in. She didn't glance around the flat the way Jonathan had. She looked only at me, since the flat was irrelevant to her."Sit down," she said. "Why did you say what you said about my daughter? And you implied that it referred to Nora's paternity.""I reported what I heard," I said. "I said others could draw their own...""Enough!"I stopped, then she pulled out the chair across to set a tablet on it. She pressed play.Jonathan's voice came through, tinny and clipped: 'If anyone ever questions t

134: The Confrontation

Penelope's POV I was in the Clerkenwell office when Jonathan walked in through the front door like he owned the building...which technically, for six more months, he did...and stood in the middle of my workspace, looking at me across three desks and two members of staff who suddenly became very interested in their screens. "Outside," he ordered. I looked at him, studying the expression on his face that I had learned to read over the years. This wasn't the controlled Jonathan. This was the other one. I stood up, and we went outside. "Adrian was at my building this morning," he said."What did he say?" I asked "He told me he was going to ask you to be with him," Jonathan said. "He came to my building and told me directly that he was choosing you. He wanted me to know before it happened." "How did that conversation go?" I asked. Jonathan looked at the street. "He said he understood what he was asking. He said he knew the history, and that he wasn't there to ask my permission. H

135: The Man in the Doorway

PENELOPE "Who is he?" I asked.Adrian hadn't answered yet.The man was still standing in the doorway. He was medium-height, older than us, and had a face that had once been handsome and had hardened without losing its structure. He wore a good coat, and he wasn't afraid of Adrian the way frightened people usually stood.He looked comfortable, and that was why it bothered me."Adrian," I called again."Give us a minute, please," he said to me.I looked at him. "No."He met my eyes. "Penelope...""No," I said. "We've been through this. I don't wait in cars while things get explained to me later."He held my gaze, then turned to the man. "This is Penelope," he said. "She stays."The man looked at me, then back at Adrian. "Your father's business partner," he said. "You know that's what I am."My hand was still in Adrian's. I felt the tension of a hand belonging to a controlled person who wasn't, for once, in control."My father died four years ago," Adrian said."Yes," the man said. "And

136: Meeting seraphina at the hospital

PENELOPE The hospital corridor was the same one I had been in. But this time around, we were on a different floor and a different ward. I walked fast enough that Jonathan struggled to keep up. Adrian had stayed in the car at my request. Not because I wanted to keep him out, but because this was a Westfield situation, and I needed my hands free to deal with it. Jonathan pushed open the ward door, and a nurse intercepted us immediately. "She's resting," she said. "She asked for me," I said. "I'm Penelope Westfield. I'm her sister." The nurse checked her clipboard, glanced at me, then stepped aside. We were in room seven, near the window which faced a wall. The light seemed to drain color from everything it touched. Seraphina lay in the bed. She looked smaller than I had ever seen her outside a hospital. The confidence she usually wore like armor, that posture of pride...all gone. She was just a woman in a bed with monitors, pale in the way that showed that her body had st

137: Monday Morning

PENELOPE *** The man's name was Gerald Harrow. I found that out on Sunday when Adrian's lawyers ran a background check and called him in the morning with the results. He is Sixty-one. A former property developer, with three civil suits in the last decade. I'm sure that he knows how to hover at the edge of legitimacy. I read the summary at my kitchen table while Adrian made coffee and Nora dismantled a tower of blocks she'd spent six minutes building. "He has done this before," I said. "He has claimed informal debts against estates." "The second civil suit," Adrian said. "He also made a private arrangement with a deceased business partner and he was paid out." "So it worked before." Penelope said "But not this time." *** Monday arrived with rain. It rained so lightly that it wasn't heard from inside. Adrian's lawyer's office sat on the eighth floor of a building that seemed to believe seriousness and comfort weren't mutually exclusive. Gerald Harrow had already arrived

138: The Woman Across the Street

PENELOPE She didn't move. She just stood there outside the coffee shop, hand raised, eyes fixed on Adrian, with the exact stillness of someone who had decided to be found.Adrian crossed the road, and I crossed with him. There was no version of this where I stayed on the pavement.Up close, she was smaller than the distance had suggested. She had Adrian's eyes, the same shape, the same depth. She dressed well, and she had a bold fashion style, and she looked like a woman who had survived something significant and came out the other side not unscathed, but upright.She looked at Adrian. He looked at her. Neither spoke for five full seconds.Then she said his name. Just his name, the way mothers say names when they've been holding them a long time."Don't," he said."Adrian...""Don't." His voice came out completely flat.She looked at me. "You must be Penelope.""Yes." I nodded, extending my hand for a handshake."I've heard about you." She mentioned "But I thought you were dead," I

139: She finally reveals herself

Adrian's POVHer name was still her name when I asked her, but everything else had changed, but the name was the one thing she couldn't bring herself to give up.She talked for forty minutes straight.Penelope sat beside me, her hands in her lap, and I was grateful for it. I needed my own hands free to grip the edge of the table. My father had older debts even before Gerald which came from decisions made in the early years of building something, back when the building needed money no legitimate source would provide. He had borrowed from people who charged in loyalty instead of interest, and when it came time to repay, he found he had none left to give them.So they took something else instead...Or tried to.My mother was what they chose as leverage. Her existence became a pressure point against my father's choices. As long as she stayed reachable, he stayed manageable.So he made her unreachable.Gerald Harrow was back then a man my father trusted who could arrange things, and who ha

140: Seraphina's recovery

Seraphina's POV They discharged me on a Tuesday. A nurse handed me a pamphlet about nutrition and a letter for my GP, then told me to test and have a regular meal even when they knew I wouldn't comply. But I complied. I understood something about the shape of my own life that I had been avoiding for years...I had been so busy affecting other people's stories that I had completely neglected my own. I took a taxi home, watching the city through the window, making a list in my head of what I actually wanted. *** I arrived at my flat, and I stood in the hallway and looked at the sitting room I had designed to impress, the kitchen I used only for coffee, the bedroom I had redecorated twice that year because I kept hoping a different colour would make it feel like somewhere I actually wanted to be. I opened the fridge, and there was half a bottle of water, an expired yogurt. Something in a container I didn't remember buying. I closed it and sat down on the cold kitchen floor. I had

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