All Chapters of The Girl He Left Behind : Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

**JAPHETH POV***Four years later.*New York hit me the second the jet doors opened cold air, a skyline I hadn't seen since the night I told her to get out of my house and never come back. I should have felt something like relief, coming home. Instead my stomach churned the whole ride into the city.I'd promised my family I'd come back once I finished school. I hadn't promised myself I was ready.My new driver, Edmund, greeted me with a nod and a handshake that felt a little too formal for a man who was about to spend every day of my life stuck in traffic with me. He drove me straight past my own penthouse toward the Montgomery mansion instead, under strict orders from my mother."She said you'd try to talk me out of it," I told him, watching the skyline blur past the window."She said you'd try that exact line on me, too, sir." He didn't even glance in the mirror. "Wasn't born yesterday."I already knew what was waiting for me at the mansion. I didn't know if *she* would be.The part

**JAPHETH POV**The conference room went quiet the second I walked in, which was somehow worse than if it hadn’t. Ten faces turned toward me, board members, division heads, a couple of lawyers I didn’t recognize, all of them doing the math on exactly how long I’d been back in the country and exactly how unqualified that made me look, sitting down in the CFO’s chair like I’d earned it instead of been handed it.“Everyone, my son, Japheth,” Dad said, like that settled anything.I sat. I nodded at faces I half-remembered from childhood dinners, men who used to ruffle my hair and now looked at me like I was a line item they hadn’t approved.One of them didn’t bother pretending otherwise.“Alaric Voss,” he said, not standing, not offering a hand. Senior VP of Finance, I placed the name a half second before I placed the face, older, sharper around the eyes than I remembered. “I’ve been with Montgomery twelve years, Mr. Montgomery. Long enough to have expected this seat myself, if I’m being