บททั้งหมดของ I BECAME THE BILLIONAIRE'S WIFE OVERNIGHT : บทที่ 151 - บทที่ 160

Emily's POV"Say that again," I said, my voice barely a whisper, the folded paper trembling between my fingers like it weighed a hundred pounds instead of a few grams of ink and pulp.Vanessa did not repeat it right away. She glanced at Nathaniel, then back at me, and for the first time since I had known her she looked less like an enemy and more like a woman who had walked into something she did not fully understand herself. "The report names Rosalind Bellamy," she said carefully. "As one of two people present at the original property fire in the village records, the fire that damaged the Whitfield family holdings here in Italy forty years ago. Nathaniel, that's your grandmother's maiden estate. Not New York. Here.""My mother's name was Rosalind Hart," I said, my mind refusing to fit the pieces together even as some colder, calmer part of me had already started doing exactly that. "She never once mentioned Italy. She never mentioned anything before Brooklyn.""Bellamy was her maiden

Emily's POV"I can't lose four hundred people's jobs because I want to stay here and hold your hand through this," Nathaniel said quietly the next morning, and I watched him hate every single word of that sentence even as he made himself say it.I had barely slept. My mind kept circling back to Antonio's promise on the stone wall, tomorrow, in daylight, and now morning had arrived carrying two competing emergencies instead of the one gentle conversation I had been bracing myself for. Diane's file on the Chicago acquisition had landed at nine sharp, exactly as promised, and from what little Nathaniel had shown me over coffee, the seventy two hour window Diane had mentioned on our wedding night was now closer to forty eight."Then go," I said, and I meant it, even though my chest ached with the effort of meaning it. "Nathaniel, I am not going to be the reason you let four hundred families lose their income. Not after everything you've spent two years trying to become instead of the man

Emily's POV"There are boxes," Antonio said quietly, standing in the doorway of an old stone shed behind the farmhouse, "that I have not opened since the year my sister left, and I think it is finally time someone did."Nathaniel had left for the airport an hour earlier, and I had spent most of that hour standing very still in the kitchen, trying to decide which feeling to hold onto first, grief for a grandfather I had married into and never known, or something closer to hope, the strange, aching hope of finally understanding the woman who had raised me. Antonio's offer felt like the only true north I had left. I followed him across the sunlit yard without hesitation.Inside the shed, dust hung thick in the slanted afternoon light, and Antonio moved with the careful reverence of a man entering a church he had avoided for decades. He knelt in front of an old wooden trunk and lifted the lid slowly, revealing stacks of letters tied with fraying ribbon, a child's drawing gone soft with ag

Emily's POV"They left together sometime before sunrise," Chloe said, breathless, standing in the farmhouse kitchen with her phone still clutched in one hand, "and nobody heard a single car engine, Emily, which honestly is the part that scares me most."I had barely slept, my mind still tangled in letters and fire reports and a grandfather in law I would never get to confront, and now this, one more impossible thread added to a weekend already unraveling faster than any of us could follow. "Maybe it's nothing," I said, though I did not believe it even as I said it out loud. "Maybe Marcus finally decided to actually give Vanessa that job lead he mentioned, and they're just sorting logistics somewhere with better cell service.""At five in the morning," Chloe said flatly, raising an eyebrow in a way that made it very clear she did not believe that theory either. "Emily, I love you, but you're reaching."Eleanor appeared in the doorway then, still in yesterday's clothes, her face drawn t

Emily's POV"Your mother sat exactly where you are sitting now," Elias Moro said, folding his weathered hands on the small wooden desk between us, "thirty years ago, asking me the very same question you just asked, and I have regretted my answer to her every single day since."The office was small and cluttered, tucked above a shuttered pharmacy two villages over, stacks of yellowed files rising in uneven towers against every wall. Nathaniel sat beside me, his hand resting warm and steady over mine, having landed only four hours earlier and come straight here without so much as changing out of his travel clothes. Antonio and Eleanor sat across the room, Marcus and Vanessa near the door, all of us crowded into a space clearly never meant to hold this many people or this much history at once."What did you tell her," I asked, my voice barely above a whisper, though some part of me had already begun to guess."I told her the truth," Elias said simply. "That Arthur Whitfield had paid me,