Forty Thousand

When my mother won a million dollars from a lottery ticket, she prepared an envelope for each of her three children. After we opened them, my younger brother and younger sister each found a bank card inside. But from my envelope, two 1-dollar coins clinked onto the floor. Seeing me freeze, a trace of unease flickered across Mother's face. "Cassian," she said hesitantly, "Logan and Sienna suffered a lot growing up because your father passed away so early. So I gave each of them 500 thousand dollars as compensation. "You're the eldest son—like a father to them. Don't fight with them over this, okay?" I glanced down at the faded down jacket I had worn for years, the fabric so worn that it had lost its color. Then, my eyes drifted to my younger brother's limited-edition sneakers and to the designer bag slung over my sister's shoulder. Mother seemed to have forgotten that when Father died, I had only been eight. I smiled faintly. "Alright. I won't fight them for it." Hearing this, Mother let out a long breath of relief. The next second, my voice turned cold. "Then I won't fight for the responsibility of supporting you in your old age either."

On the day of Claire Brooks, my wife's funeral, a grieving stranger arrived carrying white lilies. After placing them beside her portrait, he walked straight toward me. "I've envied you for thirty years," he said. Confused, I frowned as his eyes lingered on her photograph. "For thirty years, she gave me everything—her love, her time, her money. She never held anything back." He paused before looking at me with quiet resentment. "The only thing she forbade was letting you know I existed." My heart skipped a beat. "What are you talking about?" He let out a bitter chuckle. "It means that while you were married to her for thirty years, she was with me for thirty years too." Then he walked away, leaving me frozen beside her coffin. I stared after him, struggling for breath. Thirty years of betrayal and lies. The shock sent my blood pressure surging, and I collapsed in the middle of the funeral hall. When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the day Claire and I were supposed to be married. "Nathan Brooks, will you spend the rest of your life with me?" After a long silence, I took the ring from her hand and, without a moment's hesitation, threw it down the drain.

As I was cleaning up the house, I noticed something had fallen out of the cabinet my wife always kept locked tight. I remembered Megan's constant warnings. "That cabinet holds all our family's important records. If anything gets lost, there's no getting it back. Just leave it alone and don't touch it." Worried something valuable might have fallen out, I rushed to pick it up. But what I found was a thick stack of remittance slips. From forty years ago to now, every month, my wife had been sending money to the same account. And that's when it hit me. My wife had been lying to me. The money I'd been pouring into this family had been flowing right out, into the hands of someone else.

Damian, the rival heir who turned a hostile takeover into a proposal — and made it clear the merger includes her, completely. Theo, the dockworker with a past nobody can explain, who knows more about her grandfather’s will than he should. Marcus, older, composed, dangerous — a man who’s spent years waiting for his moment and doesn’t intend to lose it now. A quad marriage, legal on a technicality, was supposed to be strictly business. Separate rooms. Minimal contact. A means to an end. It lasted one week. Now Sera is living under one roof with four men who’ve stopped pretending they can share her politely — while someone close to home is working to destroy everything she just inherited. Between the sabotage threatening her company and the four different kinds of hunger she can’t seem to say no to, Sera is about to learn that the real risk was never losing the empire. It’s surviving what happens when all four of them stop holding back

How rich can a person be? My wife is incredibly rich. People call her "The Queen of Cloudridge" because nearly half the city's properties are owned by her. We've been married for five years, and every time she goes out to meet her first love, she transfers a property to my name. By the time I have 99 homes in my name, she suddenly notices that something has changed. I no longer cry, beg, or ask her to stay. I simply choose the finest mansion in all of Cloudridge, bring the property deed with me, and wait for her to sign it. She signs the papers, and for the first time, she softens. "When I get back, let's go watch the fireworks together." I quietly tuck the agreement away and hum in response. But I never tell her what she's really signed this time. It's not a property deed. It's our divorce agreement.

Six years ago, Catherine Bell signed a contract she barely understood. Fifty-fifty, he called it. Fair. Equal. Clean. What it really meant was simple. Everything would be divided. The bills. The responsibilities. The children. Even her suffering. For six years, she carried the weight of a marriage built on numbers while her husband measured love like a business transaction. She gave up promotions, endured lonely pregnancies, raised their twins almost alone, and kept their home together—believing that if she gave enough, one day he'd finally see her. He never did. Until the day she stopped giving. Now, Catherine places a neatly compiled ledger in front of Mason Blake—six years of invisible labor, sacrifices, and broken promises, calculated down to the last cent. Debts he never knew existed. Debts money can never truly repay. Then she does something he never imagined. She starts living by his rules. Fifty-fifty. As the life he'd taken for granted slowly falls apart around him, Mason discovers that money can replace labor... But it can never replace love. And by the time he finally understands what she was worth, Catherine has already learned the one lesson that changes everything. She never needed him. Now the man who built his marriage on equality is drowning in the very numbers he once worshipped. Because some things were never meant to be split in half. Especially a heart.