All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Abandoned Wife : Chapter 1 - Chapter 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

“Zoe, eat your eggs.”“I am eating them.”“You are moving them around the plate in a circle. That is not eating.”Zoe looked up. “Mummy. Are we going somewhere today?”Bianca turned from the counter. “What makes you ask that?”“You’ve checked your phone four times since I sat down and you only do that when something is happening.” Zoe stabbed a piece of egg. “Also you changed your shirt twice.”Bianca looked at her nine year old daughter sitting at the kitchen table in her pyjamas dissecting her behaviour with the calm precision of a small detective and said nothing because there was nothing to say that would not confirm everything.“We’re picking up your yellow jacket,” she said. “From the foundation.”Zoe’s face did the thing it did when she was trying not to look pleased. “Mr. Ethan has it?”“He does.”“Can I bring him something? Lily said he likes those biscuits from the tin near the reception desk but he never takes them because he thinks they’re for the children.”Bianca turned

“It’s about Zoe.”Bianca read the message three times in the lift. Same four words every time. Same cold feeling spreading from her chest outward.Daniel had not mentioned Zoe once in fourteen months. Not when the remission was confirmed. Not when the school sent the end of year report with three commendations on it. Not when Zoe’s therapist wrote the letter saying she was doing better than expected. Not once. And now suddenly, the morning after Bianca spent forty minutes in Ethan Harlow’s office, it was about Zoe.She put the phone in her bag.“Mummy.” Zoe was watching her. “Your face is doing the thing.”“I don’t have a thing.”“You do. Your jaw goes tight and you breathe through your nose.” Zoe demonstrated, poorly. “Like that.”“I’m breathing normally.”“You’re really not.”The lift opened. Bianca took her daughter’s hand and walked to the car and did not look at her phone again until Zoe was buckled in the back seat and the doors were closed.Then she called Kemi.“Daniel just te

“It’s not what it looks like.”“You haven’t asked me what I think it looks like,” Bianca said.“No.” A pause. “But I know how a man and a woman outside a hotel photographs.”She was still at the kitchen table. The apartment was quiet around her, Zoe asleep, the only light coming from the lamp in the corner that she always left on because complete darkness made her feel like she was waiting for something bad to happen.Old habit. Six years old.“Then tell me what it actually is,” she said.Ethan exhaled slowly. Not stalling. Deciding where to start.“Rosalind and I met outside that hotel because it was neutral ground,” he said. “Three months after she left the foundation. She had contacted me. She wanted to talk.” He paused. “She wanted to know if I was going to do anything about Ingrid. About the money. About what had been done to her.”“And?”“And I told her I was handling it internally. That Ingrid had agreed to repay. That I had her word.” His voice was quiet and without inflection