All Chapters of Divorced For The Heiress... But I Was The Real Billionaire : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Adrian sat in his car outside the apartment for a long time before he trusted himself to drive. The engine was off. The street was quiet except for a dog barking somewhere two buildings down and the low electrical hum of a streetlamp flickering above the windshield. He could still see the kitchen window from where he'd parked, the light still on, though he made himself look away from it after the first few minutes. His hands hadn't stopped feeling cold since he'd walked out the door. His phone rang before he'd even turned the key. Richard's name on the screen. He almost didn't answer. “It's done,” Adrian said when he finally picked up. “She signed.” A pause on the other end lasted just a beat too long. “Good. That's good, Adrian. Legal will start drafting your side of the agreement first thing tomorrow.” “My side of the agreement. What about theirs?” Another pause. “Sinclair Global hasn't signed anything yet. Arthur Sinclair has verbally agreed in principle. Nothing's finalize

The car passed through two separate gates before the estate came into view, and even then Evelyn didn't feel the awe she assumed she was supposed to feel. She just felt tired, the particular kind of tired that came from crying twice in one night and sleeping badly in a hospital bed with someone else's grief sitting in the chair beside her. The house itself looked less like a home and more like something built to be photographed. Stone the color of old bone. Windows that went up two full stories. A fountain out front that had clearly never once been turned off long enough to go quiet. Somewhere beyond the tree line she could see a second, smaller building, a guesthouse maybe, or staff quarters, and beyond that, only more land, more hedges, more of a world she had no vocabulary for yet. “It's a lot, I know,” Eleanor said, watching her face. “It didn't feel like home to me either, the first year. It felt like living inside someone else's museum.” “Does it now?” “Now it's where you gre

Adrian didn't sleep that night either.He sat in his study long after the summit ended, jacket thrown over the back of a chair, a glass of scotch going warm and untouched on the desk in front of him. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the same thing. A boy's thumb, rubbing once against his index finger. A crease between two small eyebrows that matched his own exactly.He called Daniel at six in the morning.“I need everything you can find on Ethan Sinclair,” Adrian said, before Daniel had even managed a full hello. “Birth records. Hospital. Anything.”“Sir, it's six in the morning.”“I know what time it is.”Daniel was quiet for a moment on the other end, the particular quiet of a man who had learned, over several years, exactly which of his employer's requests were worth questioning and which weren't.“I'll see what I can find.”It took him four days.Adrian spent all four of them useless for anything else, sitting through board meetings without absorbing a single word, staring at

Kingsley Group's formal request for investment landed on Evelyn's desk on a Tuesday, and she recognized Adrian's handwriting in the margins before she'd even read the cover letter.Corporate protocol required Sinclair Global's CEO to attend the initial discussion in person. She could have sent a deputy. She'd sent deputies to smaller meetings than this one for less complicated reasons. She told herself, signing off on the calendar invite, that attending herself was simply good business practice given the size of the request.She didn't entirely believe herself. She went anyway.The conference room on the fortieth floor felt smaller than she remembered rooms like it usually feeling, though she supposed that had more to do with who was sitting at the far end of the table than with the actual dimensions of the space.Adrian stood when she walked in. She noticed that. She noticed, too, that he looked older than the polished, exhausted version of himself she'd glimpsed across the ballroom

The response to Adrian's request sat unopened in Evelyn's inbox for three full days.She caught herself opening the email app a dozen times a day, thumb hovering over the subject line, and closing it again each time without reading a single word past the sender's name. Arthur asked once, gently, whether she wanted him to have legal review it for her first, take some of the weight off before she had to face it herself. She said no. Whatever this was, whatever it cost her to read, she intended to read it in her own words, on her own time, without anyone softening it first.She knew what it was without reading it. Arthur had warned her it was coming, forwarded from the family's legal team with a note that simply said, take whatever time you need. She hadn't needed the warning to recognize Adrian's name in the subject line. Some names, apparently, never stopped making her stomach drop the exact same way.She didn't open it that Saturday either, choosing instead to take Ethan to the public