The Billionaire’s Abandoned Wife のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 10

“Mummy, you’re squeezing my hand too hard.” “Sorry, baby.” Bianca loosened her grip on Zoe’s fingers but didn’t let go. Not after last night. Not after a text that had her wide awake at 3am staring at the ceiling, turning the word daughter over and over until it stopped sounding like a word and started sounding like a threat with teeth. The foundation building was glass from the ground floor up, the kind of place that made you feel underdressed just walking through the door. Bianca checked the letter in her bag one more time even though she’d read it a hundred times already. Meeting today. Nine sharp. Her hands hadn’t stopped being cold since she got out of bed. She hadn’t slept. She’d spent the night deciding whether to tell someone about the text and deciding, over and over, that there was no one safe to tell. Kemi would panic. The police would ask questions she didn’t have answers to yet. And the one person who might actually know what it meant was a man she’d met for four minut

“You didn’t answer my question.” Bianca looked up from her phone. Ethan was still standing where she’d left him a moment ago, watching her the way he had all morning, except now there was something guarded folded into it, waiting for the second half of a sentence she’d never finished. “What question,” she said, buying time. “You started to say something. Before your phone went off.” His eyes dropped briefly to the screen still lit up in her hand. “Whatever that is, it can wait thirty seconds.” She almost laughed. Almost. Instead she turned the phone face down against her palm, like that would somehow undo the words already burned into her head. Careful, Bianca. You don’t know what he’s capable of. I do. “It’s Daniel,” she said. “My ex.” Ethan’s jaw tightened, the same way it had ten minutes ago on the phone with his sister. “What does he want?” “The same thing your sister wants, apparently. For me to stay away from you.” Something dark moved behind his eyes. “Small worl

“Who sent that.” Kemi’s voice had gone flat, all the teasing from ten minutes ago burned out of it. She was standing over Bianca’s shoulder, staring at the photograph still lit up on the screen. Ethan outside a courthouse. A woman beside him. Four words underneath that felt heavier every time Bianca read them. “I don’t know.” Bianca’s thumb hovered over the screen without touching it, like the image might do something worse if she pressed too hard. “Unknown number. Same as the first one.” “Same person?” “I don’t know that either.” Kemi took the phone out of her hand, gently, the way you take something sharp away from a child. She studied the photograph for a long moment, jaw tight. “He looks like he’s about to be sick in this picture.” “I noticed.” “Who’s the woman?” “I don’t know her.” Bianca said it three times now in under a minute and each time it sounded less true, even though it wasn’t a lie. She didn’t know the woman. She just had a name now, and a feeling underneath her

“He still hasn’t called?” Kemi asked it over the school gate, arms crossed against the cold, watching Bianca’s face for the answer before she gave it. “No.” Bianca kept her eyes on the doors, waiting for Zoe to come through them. “Not last night. Not this morning. Nothing.” “That’s not like him.” “I don’t actually know what’s like him.” The words came out sharper than she meant, and she pressed her lips together, sorry for it. “I’ve known him six weeks, Kemi. I don’t get to be sure of anything yet.” “You were sure enough to text me at midnight asking if his phone was even working.” Bianca didn’t answer that, because there was nothing in it that wasn’t true. She had checked, twice, whether the network was down in his part of the city. She had told herself it was concern and not the specific ache of being promised something and then handed silence instead. Zoe came through the gate at a run, backpack half open, chattering before she’d even reached them, something about Lily and a

“Where is she.” Bianca was through the school doors before Ethan had even parked, her voice cutting across the front office loud enough that a secretary looked up fast, already pointing down the hall. “She’s fine. Physically she’s fine.” The woman’s voice was careful in the way people got careful around a mother who looked like she might come apart at any second. “She’s in the counselor’s office. She asked for you specifically.” Bianca didn’t wait for anything else. She was moving before the sentence finished, down the hall, past a row of coat hooks with a small yellow jacket among them, and pushed open the door. Zoe was curled in a chair too big for her, knees pulled to her chest, eyes red but dry, the particular composure of a child who’d already decided she wasn’t going to cry in front of strangers. The second she saw Bianca something in her small shoulders finally let go. “Mummy.” Bianca crossed the room and pulled her daughter into her lap the way she hadn’t done in ov