HER BILLION-DOLLAR SECRET

Chapter 17: I Had His Name On My Lips And I Swallowed It

She had promised her father.

Ava remembered it Sunday morning while getting dressed — Philip's voice on the phone, send me the details, I'll call tomorrow — and felt the day rearrange itself around that obligation with the quiet inevitability of something she had been half-hoping to forget.

She got ready in two versions.

The first version — jeans, soft top, hair loose — was for the drive. The second version — a dress from the wardrobe Josephine had stocked, her hair properly done, the small gold earrings she kept in her glove compartment for exactly these occasions — was for arrival. She had learned this system months ago: change at the rest stop forty minutes north of Cedarville, become someone else by degrees, arrive as the right person.

She was loading her change of clothes into the car when her phone lit up on the passenger seat.

Thomas.

Good morning. What are you up to today?

She looked at the message for a long moment.

She didn't open it. If she opened it he would see the read receipt and expect a reply and she didn't have a reply that was true and easy simultaneously — not one that explained Whitefish Lake and her father and Edward Lim and the dress in her back seat without opening a door she wasn't ready to open.

She put the phone face down and pulled out of Cedarville.

The drive north was familiar now in the way of things you had done enough times to stop seeing properly. The mountains, the highway, the trees opening up as Whitefish approached — she drove through it on a kind of autopilot, her mind running ahead to the conversation waiting for her at the other end.

Edward Lim.

Her father had come all this way. He had been patient — Philip was always patient, that was his particular method, the gentleness that made it harder to refuse than Josephine's directness — but patience had limits and apparently this was it.

She pulled into the rest stop and changed in the car with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done it before. The dress was simple but unmistakably well-made — the kind of thing that looked understated until you were close enough to see the fabric. She fixed her hair in the visor mirror and put in the earrings and looked at herself.

Ava Hartono, she thought. There you are.

She pulled back onto the highway.

The estate looked the same as it always looked — magnificent and immaculate and faintly suffocating, the flowers along the drive in their perfect rows, the fountain catching the morning light, the staff appearing at the car door before she had fully stopped.

"Miss Ava," said the housekeeper — a woman named Clara who had been with the family since before Ava was born. "Your father is at the golf course. Early tee time. He expects to be back by eleven."

"Of course he does," Ava said, not unkindly.

She went inside and up to her room — the room that had always been kept for her in every Hartono property in every country, identical in its luxury, identical in its careful impersonality — and stopped in the doorway.

New dresses in the wardrobe. She could see them through the open door — a row of them, clearly just arrived, the kind of careful selection that had Josephine's fingerprints all over it. And on the bed, laid out with deliberate elegance: accessories. A necklace. A bracelet. A silk scarf in a shade her mother had always insisted complemented her complexion.

Ava stood in the doorway and looked at it all.

She should feel nothing. She had left all of this — had chosen, deliberately and completely, to leave it. She knew what it was. She had seen behind it. She knew that luxury this specific and this plentiful was also a form of instruction: this is what you are. This is what you require. This is why you cannot stay in Cedarville making your own coffee and falling for a barista who drives an old car.

She knew all of that.

She crossed the room anyway and touched the silk scarf — the fabric was extraordinary, the kind of thing you couldn't replicate at any price point, smooth in a way that had its own specific language — and held it for a moment and felt the complicated thing she always felt in these rooms.

Not longing. Not exactly.

More like grief. For the version of herself that had believed these things were enough.

She set the scarf down and went to sit by the window and looked out at the lake and thought about Thomas's apartment — the worn leather sofa, the herbs on the windowsill, the grandmother's photograph on the nightstand — and felt the distance between those two rooms like something physical.

Her phone was in her bag.

She still hadn't replied to his message.

Brunch was set on the terrace — Josephine's preference in good weather, the lake visible beyond the garden, the table arranged with the geometric precision that meant she had supervised it personally. Philip arrived from the golf course pink-cheeked and cheerful, kissing Ava's forehead with the warmth he had always shown her that made it harder, not easier, to be here.

"You look wonderful," he said, holding her at arm's length. "Montana agrees with you."

"It does," she said honestly.

"Sit, sit," Josephine said, already at the head of the table, already surveying the spread with the satisfaction of someone who had ordered it and was confirming it had been executed correctly. She looked at Ava — the dress, the earrings, the hair — and something in her expression relaxed fractionally. "Better," she said simply.

They ate.

The food was extraordinary — it always was, Josephine did not permit otherwise — and Ava ate with genuine appetite and let her parents talk and responded when addressed and performed the version of herself that fit neatly into this terrace, this table, this family.

She missed Thomas's coffee.

Specifically, acutely, in the middle of a bite of perfectly prepared eggs benedict — she missed the specific taste of the vanilla latte he made her every morning, which was objectively not as technically accomplished as whatever was in the French press on this table and was somehow incomparably better.

She thought: I haven't replied to his message.

Philip set down his fork.

Here it was.

"About Edward," he said, in the gentle tone that meant the conversation had been building since he sat down and he was finally releasing it. "He's been very patient, Ava. A month in the country and no meeting. That's — it puts us in an awkward position."

"I've been busy," she said.

"I know." Philip nodded. "That's why I'm here. I thought — dinner tonight. The four of us. Simple. No pressure."

No pressure in Hartono family language meant: considerable pressure, gracefully applied.

Ava looked at her plate.

"Actually," she said, and felt the words forming before she had fully decided to say them — "I've been—"

She stopped.

The table was very quiet.

Thomas's name was right there — right there, at the front of her mouth, warm and real and wanting to be said. I've been seeing someone. His name is Thomas. He makes the best coffee I've ever had and he reads novels and he saved his grandmother's diner and he looked at me on a street at nine o'clock on a Monday night and said maybe we could change that and I have never in my life felt as seen as I feel when he looks at me.

That's what she had been.

She swallowed it.

All of it. Every word. Back down.

"I've been very busy," she finished. "With work. And connections. I've been building connections here."

The silence lasted one beat too long.

Josephine's eyes moved to her face with the particular sharpness of a woman who had raised her and knew every tell she had ever developed. "Seeing someone?" she said quietly. "Is that what you started to say?"

"No," Ava said. "I said I've been—"

"You said 'I've been'," Josephine said. "And then you stopped."

"I misspoke."

Another silence.

"From what family?" Josephine said, as if Ava hadn't denied it. "There are good families here. The Wentworths have a property near Whitefish — their son is—"

"Mother."

"I'm simply saying—"

"I misspoke," Ava said, with the smile she had perfected at sixteen for exactly these moments — warm, composed, final. "I'm not seeing anyone. I've been busy with work. That's all."

Philip was looking at her.

Not the way Josephine was looking at her — analytically, cataloguing inconsistencies. Philip looked at her the way he always had — with the particular attentiveness of a man who loved his daughter and had long ago learned that loving her meant sometimes watching her carry things he wasn't permitted to help with.

He knew.

Not the specifics. But the shape of it — the thing she wasn't saying, the life she was living in the gaps between their phone calls — he knew something was there. She could see it in his face.

He picked up his fork.

"Dinner tonight," he said pleasantly. "Edward is looking forward to meeting you properly."

And that was that.

Edward Lim was exactly as she remembered.

Handsome in the deliberate, maintained way of men who understood that appearance was a form of communication. Impeccably dressed. Perfectly mannered. He stood when she entered the private dining room of the Whitefish restaurant Philip had selected and smiled with the practiced warmth of someone who had been told this was important and was performing accordingly.

"Ava," he said. "It's been too long."

"Edward," she said. "You look well."

He did look well. She noticed this without feeling anything about it.

Dinner was the four of them — Philip and Josephine doing the conversational work with the smooth efficiency of people who had hosted a thousand such occasions, Edward contributing with the polished ease of a man who understood his role and played it well. He was intelligent — she registered this honestly, because she had always been honest with herself even when she wasn't honest with everyone else. He was thoughtful. He asked her questions and listened to the answers.

He did not, she noticed, ask what she loved. What she was building. What she thought about at night. What books she was reading or what her students had done that week that had surprised her or what she wanted — actually wanted, for herself, not for the family.

He asked about her plans.

He offered to introduce her to people who could be useful.

He said Montana was interesting and he could see the appeal and perhaps she'd find more opportunity in New York or Singapore once she'd satisfied the adventuring impulse.

Ava nodded and smiled and said the right things and ate her dinner and thought about a picnic blanket in a Cedarville park and a thermos of coffee and a man who had said what do you actually want like it was the most natural question in the world.

She asked to leave at eight — early morning, she explained, teaching preparation — and Edward stood when she stood and said it had been a pleasure and he hoped they could do this again before he left the country.

"Of course," she said.

Philip walked her to her car.

They stood in the quiet car park for a moment — the lake dark beyond the tree line, the night cold and still — and her father looked at her with that look.

"Are you happy?" he asked. Simply. Directly. The most Philip Hartono thing he could have said.

She looked at him — this man who had loved her quietly her whole life from behind Josephine's louder, more structured love — and felt something loosen in her chest.

"Yes," she said. And meant it completely. "I really am, Dad."

He nodded. Something in his face — not relief exactly. Something softer.

"Good," he said. "That's — good, Ava."

He hugged her — properly, briefly, the hug of a man who wasn't given to displays but meant it when he made one — and stepped back.

"Drive safe," he said.

"I will," she said.

The drive back was quiet.

She changed at the rest stop — jeans, soft top, hair loose, earrings into the glove compartment — and drove the rest of the way to Cedarville as herself.

Her apartment was dark and quiet and exactly as she had left it. She turned on the lamp by the sofa and sat down and picked up her phone.

Thomas's message was still unread.

Good morning. What are you up to today?

She looked at it for a long moment.

Then she typed:

Sorry — busy Sunday. Some friends showed up unexpectedly and I wasn't on my phone. Missed you though.

She stared at what she had written.

Friends showed up.

The first direct lie she had told him.

Not an omission — not a deflection or a subject change or a carefully worded truth that left things out. An actual lie. Small and specific and deliberate.

Her thumb hovered over send.

She pressed it.

His reply came quickly — he must have still been awake.

Missed you too. Get some sleep. See you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow.

She set the phone down on the cushion beside her and sat in the quiet of her apartment and thought about Thomas's name in her mouth at that brunch table — right there, ready, real — and the moment she had swallowed it back down.

I had his name on my lips, she thought.

And I swallowed it.

And then I came home and lied to him.

And I don't know how many more times I can do either of those things.

She turned off the lamp and went to bed in the dark and lay very still and listened to Cedarville outside her window and thought about the distance between who she was at that dinner table and who she was in this apartment and wondered, quietly and with increasing urgency, how much longer she could stand in both places at once.