All Chapters of The Billionaire's Secret Bride: Chapter 401 - Chapter 410

Point of View: Elena“Teresa, say that again. Slowly. Who has been inside Eleanor’s trunk?” Cold crawled up my arms. I had been holding my seven day old daughter, and I held her tighter.Teresa stood in the hallway with her hands knotted in her apron. Her face was the color of old paper. Behind her, the hall lamp threw a long yellow stripe across the floor.“I do not know,” she said. “That is what frightens me.”Alexander came in from the terrace. He took one look at my face and held out his arms, and I passed Claire to him. She did not wake. She only gave a tiny sigh and settled against his shoulder like she had been born there.“Where is the trunk now?” he asked.“Still in the attic. I only brought it down to the landing yesterday to dust it.” Teresa swallowed. “When I lifted the lid, the false bottom was already loose. I thought I had done it by accident. Then I saw the dust.”“What about the dust?” I asked.“It was disturbed. Fresh finger marks, on the inside edge. Not mine. Mine

Point of View: Elena“You do not need to be afraid of me, Mrs. Sterling. I only need you to be honest.” Naomi Reyes smiled, and somehow that made my heart pound harder.She sat in the glass sunroom with her hands folded over a thin leather folder. She was forty or so, with short silver streaked hair, black boots, and the steady, unhurried eyes of a person who had spent her life waiting for others to speak first. A deep green scarf with a thread of gold along the edge lay folded over the arm of her chair. Alexander had gone to fetch Richard. I was alone with her, and Claire had finally been bribed upstairs with a cartoon.“What do you know about Box 12?” I asked.“Very little. That is why I am here.” She set the folder on the table. “Two months ago, I received a letter. No name. No return address. It said that if I wanted to understand Eleanor Sterling, I should look in the Delancey Theater, in the left side boxes, behind a brass plate that is not marked. I went. The plate was there. T

Point of View: Elena“You went without me,” I said, and my voice did not sound like mine. “You went alone, in the dark, and you did not call.” Alexander stood in our kitchen at midnight with his coat still on.I had not slept. I had sat at this table for three hours with a cold cup of tea, watching the clock and the black window and the empty driveway. When his headlights finally swept across the glass, I felt something both too tired for anger and too furious to cry.“I should have called,” he said.“Yes.”“I did not want to wake you.”“I was awake.”“I did not know that.”“You did not ask.” I stood up. “Seven years, Alexander. Seven years of being partners. And the first time something real knocks on our door, you walk out of it like a man stepping off a cliff, and leave me to find out from Mr. Okafor’s text message.”He flinched. “He texted you?”“He has my number. He has had it since the day I took over the school. He says he is sorry he took the money.”“Elena.”“Do not say my na

Point of View: Elena“I am not going to ask you again, Teresa. I am going to wait. I will sit here all night if I have to.” My hands were steady. My heart was not.Teresa’s kitchen smelled of ginger and warm bread. It was ten o’clock at night. Rain tapped on the window. She sat in her rocking chair by the stove with a quilt over her knees, and she would not meet my eyes. Alexander had asked me to do this alone. Teresa trusted me more than she trusted him. He had gone to sit with Richard instead, the letter folded in his pocket like a live coal.“I do not know what you want me to say,” Teresa said.“The truth.”“I have told you the truth.”“You told us the truth about the trunk. You did not tell us about the song.”Her rocking stopped.“Seven years ago you sang a lullaby at the dinner table,” I said. “A lamp in a window. A road that always led home. Julian asked where it came from, and you said your mother sang it. But today I found a photograph of Eleanor with a man who wore a ring ca

Point of View: Elena“Mommy, who is Gideon Marsh? And why does Grandpa Richard cry when he hears his name?” Claire stood in my bedroom doorway in pajamas, clutching her stuffed rabbit.I had been sitting on the bed with the photograph in my lap. Alexander’s photograph. The picture Marcus had shown him that afternoon. It showed me, three weeks ago, crossing the stage of the Delancey Theater alone, at night.I had not been alone. I had been with the art school’s lighting technician, checking the old rigging. But the photograph had been cropped. He was gone. And I looked like a woman on the stage of an empty theater, searching for something.“Where did you hear that name?” I asked.“In the hall. Grandpa Richard was talking to Daddy.”“It is very late.”“I could not sleep.” She climbed onto the bed and curled into my side. Her hair smelled of strawberry soap. “Mommy, am I in trouble?”“No, sweetheart.”“Then why does everyone look scared?”I pressed my lips to the top of her head. I wante