All Chapters of SIGN THE PAPERS, THEN KEEP THE BILLIONS: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The divorce papers hit the coffee table hard enough to rattle my teacup."Sign."One word. That's all Roman Cheng had for me after three years of marriage and eight months of carrying his child.I didn't look at him right away. The baby kicked — a good, solid thump right under my ribs — and I pressed my palm flat against my belly, steadying us both. Easy, I thought. We're okay.Then I looked up.Not at Roman. At the woman standing behind him.Vivian Wu. Cream-colored sundress, one hand draped delicately over her stomach, her face arranged into that perfect little expression she'd been rehearsing since college — the wide eyes, the trembling lip, the I'm-so-sorry-I-didn't-mean-to look that made men want to protect her and women want to slap her.She caught me staring and dropped her gaze. Her fingers tightened on her belly.I looked back down at the papers. White paper. Black ink. My name already printed in the signature line.

The contractions woke me at three in the morning.I sat up in the dark, drenched in sweat, and knew before I even put my feet on the floor. My water had broken. The sheets were soaked. The baby was coming.I didn't panic.That might sound like something a strong person says. It wasn't strength. It was just — there was nobody to panic with. No husband to shake awake. No mother to call. No one sleeping down the hall who'd hear me gasp and come running.Just me and the dark and the clock on the nightstand reading 3:07 AM.I braced myself against the wall and walked to the bathroom. Washed my face. Pulled my hair back into a ponytail. Then I went to the closet and got the hospital bag I'd packed weeks ago — tiny onesies, tiny socks, a tiny knitted hat. All pink. I'd been hoping for a girl. Don't ask me why. Maybe because I wanted someone in my life who'd never look at me the way Roman did — like I was a line item on a budget he was trying to cut.

**ROMAN**He didn't sleep that night.He sat in his study, laptop open, staring at the paternity report his investigator had rushed over at midnight. The guy had pulled strings at the preschool — something about medical records from a routine check-up — and gotten a sample matched against Roman's DNA.The result was one line of text.**Probability of biological paternity: 99.9999%**Roman read it eleven times.His daughter.She was really his daughter.He had a three-year-old girl with pigtails and a mole on her lip and a laugh that could be heard across a soccer field, and she didn't know his name, and she thought he was dead.He pulled up the photo he'd taken at Sports Day — he'd snapped it without thinking, hands shaking, when Nadia had crouched down to draw in the sand with a stick. Pigtails. Red sneakers. That little mole.He stared at it until his vision blurred.Then something else pushed through. Co

**ROMAN**He signed the agreement.Once a month. Two hours. No telling the kid who he really was.Like prison visitation, except the prisoner was him.The first visit was at a family restaurant Serena had chosen — one of those places with crayons on the table and juice boxes in the fridge. Private dining room. Good acoustics for the sound of a grown man's ego being systematically demolished by a three-year-old.Serena didn't come. She'd sent her lawyer, David Chen, who sat in the corner with a sparkling water and a legal pad, looking like a man who'd drawn the best assignment of his career.Roman arrived ten minutes early. He'd changed his outfit three times. He'd shaved. He'd bought cologne. He'd spent twenty minutes in the car rehearsing what he was going to say to his daughter, which was pathetic, and he knew it was pathetic, and he went in anyway.Nadia was already there.She was sitting in a booster seat, legs swinging, a

**ROMAN**The siege had been going on for six months.It started with the suppliers. Three of Cheng Corp's core vendors terminated their contracts within the same week. No warning. No negotiation. Just polite emails citing *strategic realignment* and a dial tone when Roman's team called to offer better terms. Twenty percent above market rate, and they still walked.Then the investors. Two private equity firms and a sovereign wealth fund, all of whom had backed Cheng Corp for a decade, pulled their capital within a thirty-day window. The letters were boilerplate — *shifting portfolio priorities* — but the timing was surgical.Then the banks. Credit lines frozen. Lending covenants tightened. The CFO started having chest pains.Roman had spent six months fighting fires with no water. Every lead he chased turned into a wall. Every ally he called had already been neutralized. It was like boxing a ghost — something was dismantling his company piece by pi