HER BILLION-DOLLAR SECRET

Chapter 12: He's Working For Everything I Was Born With

Sunday mornings were sacred.

Ava had decided this somewhere around her third week in Cedarville — that Sundays belonged entirely to her, no alarm, no schedule, no performance of productivity. She could sleep until eight and eat breakfast slowly and read on the balcony and exist without agenda and nobody could take that from her.

She was deeply, contentedly asleep at nine forty-five when her phone pinged.

She reached for it without opening her eyes, assuming Olivia — a delivery question, an inventory update, something that could wait until Monday — and cracked one eye open to check.

The name on the screen woke her up completely.

Thomas.

Hey sleepyhead. Brunch?

She sat up.

She read it again.

Then she looked at the time — nine forty-six — and looked at the message again and felt something warm and slightly chaotic move through her chest.

Hey sleepyhead.

He had called her sleepyhead. Casually. Like they were already the kind of people who texted each other on Sunday mornings. Like this was already a thing that happened.

She was smiling before she had consciously decided to smile.

She typed back: Morning! Sure — where?

The response came immediately, like he had been waiting: Meet me downstairs at 11. I'll pick you up.

Ava looked at the time. Nine forty-seven.

She had exactly seventy-three minutes.

She got up, drank a glass of water, and stood in the middle of her apartment trying very hard not to plan things. Thomas liked surprises — she was learning this about him, the quiet pleasure he took in arranging something before she could form expectations about it — and she was trying to learn to let him.

Trust your intuition, she told herself. Just — go.

She showered and dressed in the kind of outfit that looked effortless and wasn't — a soft knit top the color of cream, her good jeans, ankle boots, her hair loose. Cute but not trying. Brunch energy.

She had always loved brunch. In Jakarta it had been a social exercise — the right restaurant, the right table, the right people watching you arrive — but she had loved the food itself, the particular luxury of a meal that existed between breakfast and lunch and owed nothing to either. She had done it with her cousins, with university friends, never with her parents who turned every shared meal into a board meeting.

Here, she thought, it would just be — brunch. With Thomas. On a Sunday.

She was ready at ten fifty-eight and made herself wait until eleven before going downstairs.

He was already there.

Leaning against his car in the Sunday morning light, jacket on, no café apron, just — Thomas. Unhurried and easy and looking at her the way he did, like she was something worth the wait.

"Good morning, gorgeous," he said.

Ava felt warmth move through her from somewhere central and smiled. "Good morning."

He opened the passenger door — of course he did, he always did — and she got in and he walked around to the driver's side and she asked, as she always asked: "Where are we going?"

"You'll see," he said, as he always said.

She laughed and looked out the window and let Cedarville move past her and decided, firmly and finally, to simply trust it.

They didn't go to a restaurant.

Thomas pulled into a park she hadn't visited before — on the quieter edge of town, trees opening up into a wide green space, a path running alongside a small creek that caught the morning light in pieces. He parked and got out and went to the trunk and produced, with the calm efficiency of someone who had planned this thoroughly, a proper picnic basket.

Ava stood on the grass and stared at it.

"A picnic," she said.

"Brunch," he corrected. "Technically."

"You made a picnic."

"I prepared brunch in a portable format," he said, completely straight-faced, and started walking toward a flat spot under a tree near the creek.

Ava followed him and watched him lay out a blanket — an actual blanket, soft and wide — and unpack the basket with the focused care of someone who had thought about each item. Containers of food she could already smell from here. A small cutting board. Real plates. A thermos that, when opened, released the specific warm scent of good coffee.

"Thomas," she said.

"Mm?"

"How did you—" she gestured at all of it — "when did you—"

"I woke up early," he said simply, and handed her a plate.

She sat down on the blanket and looked at what he had brought — smoked salmon, sliced fruit, soft cheese, small pastries that were still faintly warm, a container of something egg-based that smelled extraordinary — and felt something tighten behind her sternum that she had no immediate language for.

In Jakarta, she had been taken to Michelin-starred brunches. She had eaten on terraces overlooking the city with the children of presidents and CEOs and had been served by staff in pressed uniforms and had found it, more often than not, completely forgettable.

This — a blanket on the grass in Cedarville, Montana, a thermos of coffee, a man who had woken up early to make this happen — this she would remember.

"If you keep doing this," she said, filling her plate, "I might fall for you."

She had meant it lightly. A joke. The kind of thing you said over a picnic blanket on a Sunday morning to make someone smile.

Thomas looked at her — calm and warm and entirely certain — and said:

"Well. Isn't that what I want to happen?"

She looked at him.

He looked back at her with the complete, unashamed honesty of someone who had decided something and saw no reason to dress it up.

She felt her heart do something complicated and wonderful.

"Eat your brunch," she said softly.

He smiled and reached for his coffee.

They ate slowly, the way Sunday mornings deserved — talking between bites, watching the creek, letting the conversation go wherever it wanted without steering it. A dog appeared on the path and Thomas fed it a corner of pastry and the dog regarded him with profound approval before trotting on.

"You're good with animals," Ava observed.

"My grandmother had three dogs," he said. "And two cats who hated each other. You learn."

She smiled. Then — "Tell me about her. Your grandmother."

He was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that meant he was deciding how much to give, not whether to give it. She had noticed this about him — that he thought before he spoke, that his words meant what they said.

"She raised me," he said. "My mom left when I was four. I don't really — I don't have much memory of her. My grandmother was just — everything. She had the diner, worked six days a week, never complained about any of it." A pause. "She used to say the secret to a good life was knowing the difference between what you needed and what you thought you needed."

"She sounds like someone worth knowing," Ava said softly.

"The best person I've ever known," he said simply.

She watched his profile — the way he looked at the creek when he talked about her, the particular stillness of someone handling something precious — and felt the familiar ache of Annita, of early mornings and quiet care and the person who had loved her without condition or agenda.

"I have someone like that," she said quietly. "Back home."

He looked at her. Didn't push. Just — received it.

"She sounds important," he said.

"The most important," Ava agreed.

They were quiet for a moment, companionably, the creek moving alongside them.

Then Thomas said — almost casually, like it was simply the next natural thing — "I've been saving up."

"For what?"

He smiled — private and a little excited, the smile of someone who had been carrying something carefully and was deciding to share it. "The diner," he said. "My grandmother's diner. It's been closed for two years — she can't run it anymore, her health. But the building is still there. Still hers." He paused. "I want to reopen it. Update it a little, keep the bones of it. Something that feels like her but also — mine."

Ava was very still.

"I've been saving since I was nineteen," he continued, pulling a piece of grass from the ground and turning it between his fingers. "I'm maybe two, three years away if things go well. I've been studying — business management at night, online courses. The café is good experience. I'm learning everything I can."

He said it the way he said most things — without performance, without the particular inflation of someone who needed their dreams to sound impressive. Just — this is what I'm building. This is where I'm going.

Ava looked at him and felt something move through her that was three things at once.

The first was pure, uncomplicated admiration — the specific awe of watching someone work toward something with patience and integrity and complete self-reliance.

The second was tenderness so acute it almost hurt — for the boy raised by his grandmother, learning her recipes, carrying her legacy forward one saved paycheck at a time.

The third was guilt.

Quiet, corrosive, settling into her chest like something she couldn't put down.

Two or three years, she thought.

She knew, without doing any calculation at all, that she could write a check for the entire amount before they finished their coffee. She knew that the diner Thomas was saving for — the building, the renovation, the equipment, all of it — would not register as a significant expenditure against the Hartono family accounts. She knew that her monthly allowance, sitting untouched in a Jakarta account she hadn't accessed since leaving, was more than he made in a year.

She knew all of this and sat on a picnic blanket in a Montana park eating food he had woken up early to prepare and said nothing.

This is why you can't tell him, said a voice in the back of her mind. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Because the moment he knows, this— she looked at the blanket, the thermos, the creek, him — all of this changes. He'll see the distance between you. He'll feel it.

And you can't bear that.

"Ava?"

She looked up. Thomas was watching her with that quiet attentiveness — reading her the way he always seemed to read her, catching things she hadn't meant to show.

"Sorry," she said. "I was just—" she chose carefully — "thinking about how clear you are. About what you want."

"Is that unusual?" he asked.

"In my experience," she said honestly, "yes."

He looked at her for a moment. "What do you want?" he asked. "Not work. Not the plan. What do you actually want?"

Nobody had asked her that in a very long time.

She looked at the creek.

"This," she said quietly. "Something like this."

He didn't ask her to explain what she meant. He just nodded — slow and certain — and reached over and refilled her coffee from the thermos.

"Then let's make sure you get it," he said simply.

They stayed until the thermos was empty and the pastries were gone and the Sunday morning had softened into afternoon. Thomas packed everything back into the basket with the same care he had unpacked it — nothing rushed, nothing careless — and they walked back to the car through the dappled shade of the park path with their shoulders occasionally brushing and neither of them moving away.

She thought about his grandmother's diner. She thought about nineteen-year-old Thomas opening a savings account and deciding, quietly and without fanfare, that he was going to build something.

She thought about the Hartono family accounts. The properties. The portfolio. The wealth that had existed before she was born and would exist long after, regardless of anything she did or didn't do.

He's working for everything I was born with, she thought.

The thought sat in her chest like a stone — not crushing, but present. Undeniable.

And he has no idea.

Thomas opened her car door and she got in and he walked around to the driver's side and she watched him and thought: if he knew, would he still look at me like that?

She didn't know.

She was terrified to find out.