All Chapters of The Billionaire's Secret Bride: Chapter 451 - Chapter 460

Point of View: Elena“Do not tell me it is not what it looks like, Alexander. Tell me what it is. Tell me the truth, even if it is worse, because I would rather bleed from the truth than smile over a lie.”I said it in the alley behind the Delancey Theater, with the stage door banging shut behind me and the rain coming down in cold gray ropes. I had both halves of page forty one pressed against my chest under my coat. My hair was soaked in seconds. I did not care. I only knew I could not breathe in that dark hall, with my mother’s mural watching and her signature lying on the boards like a stranger.Alexander came out after me without his coat. He stopped three steps away, with water running down his face. He did not try to touch me.“I did not know,” he said.“You expect me to believe that?”“I expect you to ask me again in a year, and in ten years, and I will say the same thing.” His voice shook. “I swear it on Claire. I never saw that page. I never heard of an introduction. I never

Point of View: Elena“Look at the two M’s, Elena. Your mother wrote her M’s with a loop that never lands in the same place twice. These two are twins. Nobody signs the same name twice exactly.”Naomi Reyes said it at one in the morning, in my kitchen, with her glasses on top of her head and a magnifying glass in her hand. The kitchen smelled of burnt coffee and wet coats. The clock over the stove said 1:04. A cold pot of Marcus’s soup sat in the middle of the table, and around it lay all the pieces of the night. Two halves of page forty one. A stack of cream birthday cards. A laptop open to a county records website. A cup of tea going cold at my elbow.Claire was asleep upstairs. Our neighbor, Mrs. Garza, had gone home an hour ago with a promise of pancakes. I had checked on my daughter three times. Each time I stood in the doorway and listened to her breathe, and each time something in my chest loosened and tightened again.Alexander sat beside me. Marcus stood by the window with his

Point of View: Elena“Do not stand, Mr. Quill. Sit, the way you will sit in court on Monday. I want to look at your face while I ask what my mother ever did to you.”I said it at one o’clock on Friday afternoon, in a high, dark office at 14 Marlow Street. I stood in front of an enormous mahogany desk with my hands folded and my heart trying to climb out through my throat. The room smelled of lemon polish, old paper, and cold tea. A tall clock ticked against the wall like a slow heartbeat. A glass cabinet held a collection of fountain pens, each one laid on green velvet.Edmund Quill did not stand. He smiled, folded his long hands on the blotter, and looked at me with fond, sad eyes.“Mrs. Sterling. What a surprise.”“I made an appointment.”“With my assistant, who did not tell me. How careless of her.” He gestured to a leather chair. “Please. Sit. Tea?”“No, thank you.”“You are your mother’s daughter. She also refused my tea.”I had promised Alexander. That was the rule. I had told h

Point of View: Elena“What if she did sell me, Richard? What if the page is wrong in its words but right in its heart, and I stand up there and prove my own mother a liar? Tell me honestly.”I said it at a quarter past seven, in a narrow side room behind the stage of the Sterling Hall ballroom, with my hands wrapped around a paper cup I had not drunk from. The door was shut. Through it came the low roar of a crowd taking its seats, hundreds of chairs scraping on parquet, a cough, a laugh, the rustle of coats. Somewhere a camera crew was arguing about cables.Richard Sterling sat in a wheelchair beside a velvet curtain, in a gray suit that hung loosely on him. A nurse named Okoye stood behind him with a blanket over her arm and an expression of firm disapproval. The doctor had allowed ninety minutes. Richard had said he would take three hours. They had settled, with a lot of sighing, on two.“Come closer, Elena,” he said.I knelt beside the chair. His hand was cool and dry as paper. He

Point of View: Elena“Last Wednesday a nine year old told a room of grown ups that her mother was for hugging, not for sale. I have come here to prove she is right. Please listen, because I will only say it once.”My voice shook on the first sentence. By the second it was steady. I stood behind the lectern with my hands flat on the wood, and I looked down at six hundred faces. The lights were very bright. Heat pressed on my forehead. I could smell wax and old velvet and the faint metallic tang of fear, mine and everyone’s.In the second row, Edmund Quill did not stand.“Mr. Quill,” I said again, pleasantly. “I will wait.”The silence stretched. Slowly, with the air of a man humoring a child, Quill rose. He buttoned his jacket. The rose on his lapel trembled very slightly.“Mrs. Sterling,” he said, in his velvet voice. “You are distressed. This is not the place.”“It is exactly the place.” I nodded to the back. “Priya, the screen, please.”A white screen dropped from the ceiling behind