The Billionaire He Threw Away Chapter 02

The Billionaire He Threw Away Chapter 02

I didn’t sleep that night.

I sat in a 24-hour diner three blocks from our apartment, staring at the email until the words blurred. The waitress refilled my coffee four times without me asking. She had kind eyes. She probably thought I was homeless.

Maybe I was.

By 6 a.m., I had called the law firm. A man named Gerald Fletcher answered on the second ring, as if he’d been waiting.

“Ms. Wentworth,” he said, and the way he said my name—with weight, with respect—almost made me cry again. No one had called me that in years. “We’ve been looking for you for quite some time.”

“My grandmother disowned my mother,” I said flatly. “Why would she leave anything to me?”

A pause. Then, gently: “Mrs. Wentworth changed her will six months before her passing. She left everything to you—and only you. She also left a letter. I think it would be best if you came to our office.”

I agreed to meet him that afternoon.

When I returned to the apartment to shower and change, Vanessa was asleep in my bed. I could see her through the half-open bedroom door—curled up under my duvet, her dark hair fanned across my pillow.

Liam was in the kitchen making breakfast. Eggs and toast—my usual. But when he plated it, he carried it toward the bedroom.

For her.

He noticed me standing in the doorway only because I was blocking his path.

“Oh,” he said. “You’re back.”

Oh. Like I was a neighbor who’d wandered into the wrong apartment.

“I need to shower,” I said.

“Keep it quick. Vanessa has a doctor’s appointment at nine. She’ll need the bathroom.”

Something cracked inside me. Small and quiet, like a bone fracture you don’t feel until hours later.

I showered in four minutes. Changed in two. I didn’t bother drying my hair. The December air would do it for me—and the cold would keep me from feeling anything else.

As I was leaving, Liam called out from behind me.

“Elise. We need to talk tonight. About the arrangement.”

The arrangement. He meant the terms of my displacement. How much space I’d be allowed in my own home. Which hours I could use the kitchen. Whether I was permitted to exist in his presence or if that privilege now belonged exclusively to Vanessa.

“Sure,” I said without turning around.

Gerald Fletcher’s office was on the forty-second floor of a building in Midtown that I’d walked past a hundred times without ever looking up.

He was a silver-haired man in his sixties, immaculate, with the quiet authority of someone who had managed very powerful people’s secrets for a very long time.

He slid a letter across the desk. Cream-colored envelope. My name in shaky handwriting.

*Elise,*

*I was wrong about your mother. I was wrong to let pride cost me my daughter and my granddaughter. I cannot undo what I’ve done, but I can leave you what I have. Use it well. Use it freely. And never—never—let anyone make you feel small.*

*Your grandmother,*

*Margaret*

I pressed the letter to my chest and wept.

Gerald waited patiently. When I composed myself, he laid out the documents.

“The estate is substantial,” he said. “Wentworth Industries spans real estate, technology, and media. You now own fifty-one percent of the company. The board has been operating under interim leadership, but they are… eager to meet you.”

“They don’t know who I am?”

“No one does. Your grandmother kept your identity sealed. Even the board only knows the heir by a trust number.” He paused. “Ms. Wentworth, you can reveal yourself whenever you choose. Or not at all.”

I thought of Liam. Of Vanessa in my robe. Of the couch.

“Not yet,” I said.

Gerald nodded, as though he’d expected that answer.

“There is one more thing,” he added. “Wentworth Industries recently acquired a thirty percent stake in a media startup called Prism Digital.”

I blinked. “Prism Digital?”

“Yes. I believe the founder is someone you know.”

My stomach dropped.

Prism Digital was Liam’s company. The startup he’d been building for three years. The one I’d helped fund with my savings.

I now owned thirty percent of my husband’s dream—and he had absolutely no idea.