บททั้งหมดของ The Heiress He Mistook For Nothing: บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 8

The elevator doors closed and I finally let my shoulders drop.Just for a second. Just until the fourteenth floor disappeared behind me and there was nobody left to perform composure for.Claire was still upstairs collecting our documents. I had told her I needed a minute. She had looked at my face and not asked a single question, which is why I have kept her around for four years.The elevator was empty. Mirrored walls on three sides. I stared at my own reflection and barely recognised the woman looking back.Good. That was the point.The Amelia who walked into that boardroom was not someone Sebastian had ever met. She was built deliberately, piece by piece, over six years of very quiet, very deliberate work. The posture. The suit. The way she looked at him and felt nothing.Felt nothing.I pressed the lobby button again even though it was already lit.The elevator hummed downward. I watched my reflection the whole way. Composed. Untouchable. The woman I had built from the wreckage o

"You look terrible."Claire set a coffee in front of me and sat down across the table without waiting to be invited. That was the thing about Claire — she had never once waited to be invited anywhere. It was one of her best qualities and occasionally her most annoying one."Good morning to you too," I said."I'm serious. You have the face you get when you've been thinking all night instead of sleeping.""I slept.""For how long?"I picked up the coffee. Did not answer.Claire leaned back in her chair and looked at me the way she always did — like she was reading something written in a language most people could not see. She was sharp that way. Quietly, consistently sharp, with her natural hair pinned back and her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead even when she was not reading anything. Four years working beside me and she had never once needed me to explain what I was not saying."He texted you," she said. Not a question."He texted me.""And you didn't reply.""I didn't reply

I stood in that lobby for a long time.People moved around me. A security guard glanced over twice. A woman with a rolling suitcase cut around me like I was furniture. I did not move. I just stood there with the photograph in my hand and my son's face looking up at me and absolutely nothing functioning correctly in my chest.Eli.I said his name again, quietly, just to hear what it felt like a second time.It felt like something I should have known for six years and didn't.The lobby kept moving. Phones rang at the front desk. Two men in suits walked past arguing about a quarterly report. The whole world was just continuing, completely unbothered, while I stood in the middle of it holding a photograph of a little boy who had my jaw and had never once heard my name.I do not remember walking to my car.I was just suddenly in it, sitting in the driver's seat in the underground car park with the photograph on the passenger seat and my keys in my hand and no idea what I was supposed to do

I heard him before I got the door fully open."Mummy."Six years old and still running at me like I had been gone for a month instead of a day. He hit me at full speed — arms around my waist, face buried in my side, the solid warm weight of him that never got ordinary no matter how many times it happened.I dropped my bag on the floor and held him with both arms.Just long enough to remember what everything was actually for."You're squeezing," he said into my jacket."I know.""I can't breathe.""You're talking, so you can breathe."He laughed — that full, unguarded laugh that came from somewhere in his stomach — and pulled back to look up at me. His face was exactly the same as it always was. Open. Watchful. Already three questions lined up behind his eyes before he had finished greeting me."Mrs. Adaeze gave me extra homework," he announced. "I finished it all.""All of it?""All of it. Even the reading part.""Even the reading part." I looked at him seriously. "That deserves somet