The Billionaire Meant for my Stepsister

THE READING OF THE WILL POV: Kathryn Judith couldn’t get the words out of her mouth. In all the years of her being married to my father, I had never seen her as shaken as she seemed now. She was white, that's if an already white person could be described to be whiter. She sat across from me with one of her hands pressed flat over her mouth like she could physically hold the sentence in, and when she finally spoke, her voice cracked in the middle of it, the way it had at my father's funeral. "My parents want Elouise," she said. "They want her to marry someone of their choosing, and they have given this as the only condition for me to fulfill if they are to restore the inheritance I lost after I married your dad.” The office smelled of cedar polish and old paper. Outside, Lagos traffic pressed its horn against the window like it wanted a say too. I didn't move. I was still holding the number the lawyer had given us five minutes earlier. On it was written the debt my father left behind. I hadn't been able to put down that piece of paper. I clung on to it as if my life depended on it, and in a way, it did. "Judith." I said her name carefully, the way you'd touch something that might still be hot. "What does that mean?" "It means my own mother and father are willing to fix what's broken in this family," she said, "as long as they get to decide who my daughter marries to do it." Her hands dropped into her lap. She looked, in that moment, twenty years younger and entirely undone. "I should never have called them. I told myself I wouldn't. I held out for eleven months. Eleven good months and then I saw what your father left behind and I panicked, and I called them anyway." I had never once heard Judith apologize for her own parents before. I had never heard her say their names without something brittle in her voice, and now I understood why. "You don't talk about them," I said. "Why don't you ever talk about them? She let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "Because I left everything to marry your father, Kathryn. Every penny of it. My parents told me if I married a Nigerian man, I would never see a cent of the Whitmore estate, and I told them I didn't care, and I meant it. I have never once regretted it. Not for a single day, not even now, sitting here with more debt than either of us can carry." Her eyes were wet, but her voice held steady, the way it never did when she was only performing grief. "I loved your father with my whole life. I would do it again tomorrow if he asked me." Elouise sat beside her, very still, twisting a tissue into a small white rope. When I had earlier walked into the office, I had assumed that this would be Judith's scheme. I understood now, watching her shake, that it was the opposite. Judith had spent eleven years building a wall between us and the people who raised her, and she had just torn it down herself, out of desperation, and she hated herself for it. "There's a condition," Judith said again, softer now, like saying it twice might make it smaller. "Elouise will marry a man my parents have selected. Michael Ashford. He's an English billionaire, apparently, although I couldn't tell you a single thing about who he actually is." I looked at my stepsister. I didn’t know what to expect. Fear, perhaps? Instead Elouise lifted her chin, and there was something almost relieved in her face, like she'd rather have a name and a task than this slow drowning we'd all been doing since Papa died. "When do we leave," Elouise asked, and her voice didn't shake at all. Judith reached for both our hands at once, mine and Elouise's, and held on like she was the one who needed steadying. "You don't have to do this," she said to her daughter. "Either of you. I will find another way before I let my parents own one more piece of this family." "There isn't another way," Elouise said gently. "Not one that pays Papa's debts in time." Judith's face crumpled, just for a second, before she pulled it back together. "Then you'll come too," she said to me, and this time it didn't sound like a command, it sounded like a plea. "Please, Kathryn. I can't do this without you. I never could." I thought about the years since my father died, the quiet ways I had absorbed every cost so no one else had to feel it. I thought about how exhausted I was of being the only steady thing in this house. And I thought about how, for the first time, the woman asking me to give something up looked just as broken by it as I felt. "Of course I'll come," I said. It was the first time in eleven months that saying yes didn't feel like losing.