All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Abandoned Wife : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

“Oates knows everything,” Ethan said. “That’s her job.”“She can’t know that,” Bianca said. “We decided last night.”“We decided last night and I called Patrick this morning and Patrick knows everything about everyone.” He looked at the message. “It’s a very short chain.”Bianca looked at the screen.Then she started laughing. The real kind, the full kind, the kind that came from somewhere she had not known was available at eight o’clock on a Wednesday evening.Ethan watched her laugh with the expression he always had when it happened, the one that said this is the thing, this exact sound, this is the thing I would do considerable work to produce.“Patrick told Oates,” she said.“Patrick told Oates,” he confirmed.She put the phone down.She was still smiling when she turned to him. He was already close, the way he was always close now, and she put her hand flat on his chest and felt his heartbeat under her palm and thought about everything that had arrived at this kitchen in the last

“It’s live,” Ethan said.He was at the kitchen table with his laptop open and she was beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, and on the screen was the government website with the framework announcement at the top and her photograph next to her father’s, side by side, fifty years apart.She looked at it.At the two photographs. Thomas in 1975 in a garden somewhere, young and certain. Herself in a green dress in a kitchen that used to be his to visit, the frame on the wall behind her, the recipe card visible if you knew where to look.The caption read: The Adeyemi-Harlow Framework for Institutional Transition. Founded by Thomas Adeyemi and Margaret Harlow, 1976. Developed and formalised by Bianca Adeyemi Harlow, 2024.She sat with it.Not managing it. Not calculating what it meant or how people would receive it or what came next. Just sitting with it the way she sat with the things that were too large and too true to do anything except feel.“Your name,” Ethan said. “Bot

“She’s here,” Kemi said.It was Saturday. Bianca was at the counter when the message came through and she looked at it and then at Ethan and he was already taking the bread out of the oven because he had timed it deliberately so it would be ready when her mother arrived.She went to the door.Her mother stood on the step with a bag over one shoulder and a photograph album under her arm and the expression of a woman who had been making this journey in her mind for thirty years and had finally made it in her body.She was smaller than Bianca remembered.Not smaller. More present. The way people became more present when they were standing in front of something they had been imagining for a long time.She looked at her daughter.She looked past her at the kitchen doorway. At the house.“He came here,” she said. Her voice was very quiet.“Yes,” Bianca said. “He came here.”Her mother walked past her into the house.Kemi met Bianca’s eyes over her mother’s head. The look that said I have be

“Tell me what it involves first,” Zoe said.She was at the top of the stairs with her notebook under her arm. She had not come down. She was assessing from a position of information before committing, which was entirely Zoe.Bianca picked up the phone from the counter.“Dr. Okafor,” she said. “My daughter wants to know what it involves before she answers.”A pause on the line. Then Dr. Okafor, and Bianca could hear the warmth in it: “She’s ten?”“Yes.”“Tell her it involves forty-three countries listening to what it felt like from the inside. Not the framework. The experience. What transition actually meant for someone who lived it.” A pause. “Tell her she would be the most important person in the room.”Bianca looked up the stairs.She relayed it.Zoe stood at the top and processed it with the systematic attention she gave everything that mattered.“Will I have to speak at a microphone,” Zoe said.“Possibly.”“Will there be translation.”“Yes. Into multiple languages.”Zoe was quiet

“Read it now,” Zoe said. “Not later.”She was at the kitchen table when they got home. The notebook was closed in front of her and she was eating an apple with the patience of someone who had been waiting the correct amount of time and had decided the correct amount was up.Bianca sat down.Ethan sat beside her.Zoe pushed the notebook across.Bianca opened it.She read.My name is Zoe. I am ten years old. I was in a programme that my great-grandfather designed before I was born. He died before he could see it work. I am going to tell you what it felt like from the inside because nobody else can.When I was sick, the doctors talked about me in a language I understood but they did not explain to me. They used my name but they were not talking to me. They were talking about me. I was the subject of sentences I was not invited into.The programme was different. In the programme, someone asked me what I noticed. Not what I felt. What I noticed. Because they understood that a child who has