HER BILLION-DOLLAR SECRET

Chapter 5: Gold Cage, Pretty Lies

The voice message came at seven in the morning.

Ava was still in bed, hair loose, halfway between sleep and consciousness, when she reached for her phone and saw the notification. Not a text. Not a missed call. A voice message — which meant Josephine Hartono had something to say that required full sentences and proper diction.

She pressed play.

"Ava." Her mother's voice filled the small studio apartment like it had always owned the space. "I have flown to America. I am at the Whitefish estate. It is one hour from wherever you are staying. You will come for brunch on Sunday. This is not a request."

A pause.

"Also, your skin looked dry in the photo Ayu sent me. Please moisturize."

End of message.

Ava stared at the ceiling for a long moment.

Then she got up, made her coffee, and accepted the inevitable.

The drive to Whitefish Lake took exactly fifty-four minutes.

Ava knew because she had made it in her head a hundred times — the distance between her two lives measured in miles and minutes and the slow, particular kind of dread that settled in her stomach the moment she turned onto the highway heading north.

She had put on the nicest dress she owned — a simple navy wrap that she had bought on sale in Missoula three weeks ago — and done her hair properly and told herself she looked fine. Presentable. Normal-person-visiting-family normal.

She knew the moment her mother saw her that it would not be enough.

The drive was smooth, the Montana landscape opening up around her in that breathtaking way it always did — mountains and sky and space so vast it made Jakarta feel like a fever dream. Ava gripped the steering wheel and ran through her talking points.

I'm extending my stay. I've been meeting important people. I have opportunities here. No, I'm not coming home yet. No, I don't have a return ticket. No, there's no one you need to worry about.

No, no, no.

Is it just Mother? she wondered as the highway curved north toward the lake. Or did she bring the whole family?

The thought made her accelerate slightly.

The Hartono estate at Whitefish Lake appeared through the trees like something from a dream she had been trying to wake up from for years.

It was enormous. Of course it was. Her father had designed it to mirror their Jakarta home — the same sweeping courtyard, the same manicured grounds, the same European figurines and hand-selected vases positioned with museum precision. The flowers along the entrance were in perfect bloom, the grass so immaculately kept it looked painted, the outdoor furniture arranged with the geometric exactness that meant only one thing.

Mother is here.

When Josephine Hartono was in residence, everything was in its place. Always. Without exception.

Ava pulled up to the front and a staff member opened her car door before she had fully stopped. She stepped out, smoothed her dress, and looked up at the house.

This is the life I left behind, she thought. And it followed me. One hour down the highway.

Josephine was descending the main staircase when Ava walked in — and if the entrance was choreographed, which it absolutely was, it was done with the kind of effortless precision that only decades of practice produced.

She was wearing a pale gold satin dress with a neckline that required confidence to pull off, her jewelry understated and therefore astronomically expensive, her hair arranged in the style she had worn since Ava was a child. She looked exactly like what she was — a woman who had never once in her life wondered whether she belonged in a room.

She smiled when she saw Ava.

Then her eyes moved — slowly, methodically, from the top of Ava's head to the tips of her shoes — and the smile did something complicated.

"Darling." She kissed both of Ava's cheeks and held her by the arms, and Ava recognized the grip immediately. Not affectionate. Diagnostic.

"Mother," Ava said warmly. "You look beautiful."

"Mm." Josephine was still looking at her. At her skin — not maintained. At her dress — no label she recognized. At her shoes — the nice ones, the ones Ava had thought were her nicest, which under her mother's gaze now felt like something a school librarian might wear.

"You don't look well," Josephine said finally, with the particular gentleness of someone delivering a verdict. "Your skin is dry. Your dress is—" a pause that did more damage than any adjective could — "simple. And these shoes, Ava."

"I'm hungover," Ava said, which was a lie, but a useful one. "We had a party last night. I didn't have time to prepare properly. I'm sorry, Mother."

Josephine's expression shifted from disapproval to something approaching understanding. Parties she could accept. Parties meant socializing. Socializing meant networking. That was acceptable Hartono behavior.

"No matter," she said, releasing Ava's arms and turning to the nearest staff member. "Take Miss Ava to the blue guest suite and help her get ready. Use the wardrobe I had sent from New York."

"Mother, really, I'm fine—"

"You are representing this family in America," Josephine said pleasantly, already moving toward the sitting room. "You will look like it. Go freshen up, darling. Brunch in forty minutes."

It was not a conversation. It had never been a conversation.

Ava followed the staff member upstairs.

She came down forty minutes later in a dress that cost more than two months of her Cedarville rent, her hair done, her skin treated with products that had been flown in from a Paris dermatologist, her feet in heels that were elegant and quietly ruinous.

Josephine looked up from her chair and her entire face changed.

"There," she said, with the satisfaction of someone whose hypothesis had been proven correct. "There is my daughter."

That's not your daughter, Ava thought. Your daughter left. I'm just visiting.

But she smiled and sat down and accepted the cup of tea a staff member placed in front of her and let her mother talk.

And Josephine talked — about Jakarta, about the family, about her cousin's boutique launch and her sister's new project and the various social events that Ava's absence had required creative explanation for. She talked the way she always did — with authority and precision and the absolute certainty that everything she said was important because she was the one saying it.

Ava listened and nodded and gave the answers that were expected of her.

"You've been away too long," Josephine said eventually, setting down her cup. "People are asking questions."

"People always ask questions," Ava said.

"About you specifically." A pause — perfectly timed, perfectly weighted. "Edward has asked about you three times in the past month."

Ava kept her expression perfectly neutral. "Edward Lim?"

"His family just completed the merger with Hartono Group," Josephine said, smoothing an invisible wrinkle from her dress. "It makes a great deal of sense, Ava. The Lims are good people. Old money. Excellent reputation. Edward is thirty-two, established, and—"

"Mother."

"—he asked about you specifically. Not your sister. Not your cousin. You."

"Mother," Ava said again, more carefully this time.

Josephine looked at her with the particular expression she reserved for conversations she had already decided the outcome of. "I am not saying marry the man tomorrow. I am saying — come home. Meet him properly. Let things develop naturally."

Naturally, Ava thought. Nothing about this family has ever happened naturally.

"I'll think about it," she said, which was the only answer that would end the conversation without starting a war.

Josephine studied her for a moment — those sharp, intelligent eyes that had never once missed anything — then said, almost gently: "He will be in Montana next week, Ava. He has meetings in Missoula. I have invited him to dinner here on Friday."

The air in the room changed.

"Mother—"

"You don't have to commit to anything," Josephine said. "Simply — be here. Have dinner. Let him see you looking like yourself." She gestured at the dress, the hair, all of it. "Like this. Not—" the smallest pause — "whatever you have been doing."

It was the most direct thing she had said all morning, and it landed like one.

"Friday," Ava repeated.

"Friday," Josephine confirmed, and picked up her tea with the air of someone who had just resolved a minor administrative matter. "That's all I'm asking."

It was, they both knew, not all she was asking. Not even close.

Ava excused herself after brunch claiming exhaustion and retreated to the guest suite. She sat on the edge of the enormous bed — silk sheets, imported pillows, a view of Whitefish Lake that would have made anyone else breathless — and looked at her hands.

Her nails were short and unpainted. She had stopped maintaining them months ago. In Cedarville nobody noticed. Nobody cared.

Edward Lim, she thought. In person. On Friday.

She had met him twice at family functions. He was handsome in the polished, deliberate way that Jakarta's elite tended to produce — good suits, good schools, good family. He said the right things at the right moments. He had never once, in either of their meetings, asked her a single question about herself.

Not one.

She thought about Thomas in the café that morning — leaning against the counter, talking about Little Fires Everywhere like the characters were people he actually cared about. I think about most things a lot, he had said.

She stood up abruptly.

Stop it, she told herself firmly. Stop comparing. Stop thinking about him. Stop—

Her phone buzzed. A text from her mother, sent from two floors below.

Dinner at seven tonight, since you're already here. Edward is driving up from Missoula. Please wear the blue dress.

Ava read it twice.

Tonight.

She sat back down on the silk sheets and stared at the lake.

So she would not be going home after brunch. She would not be driving back to Cedarville in the afternoon light with her heels off and the window down. She would be sitting at the Hartono dining table in a dress her mother had selected, across from a man her mother had chosen, performing the version of herself she had spent three months learning to put down.

Of course, she thought. Of course.

Edward Lim arrived at six forty-five — early, which she suspected was intentional.

He was exactly as she remembered: tall, composed, the kind of handsome that required maintenance and received it. He wore a jacket that fit him perfectly and shook hands with the staff by name, which might have been genuine warmth or might have been performance, and she found she couldn't tell the difference. She had met men like this her entire life. She was fluent in them.

"Ava," he said, when he saw her. His eyes moved over her once — not the way Thomas's had in the doorway of Cedar & Co., warm and wondering, like he was seeing something that surprised him — but with the particular assessment of someone checking a column of figures. "You look well."

"Edward," she said. "It's good to see you."

It was not entirely a lie. He was not a bad person. She had never thought he was a bad person.

But he took the chair beside her without asking, poured her water without asking, and spent the first twenty minutes of dinner talking about his Missoula meetings with the easy assumption that she was interested — not asking whether she was, not wondering, simply assuming — and something in her chest went very, very quiet.

He has already decided, she realized, watching him. Not about me specifically. About the role. He has decided he wants the role, and I am the person in it, and that is, to him, sufficient.

She looked at her plate and thought about a man who had remembered her coffee order and her name out of a whole café full of people and had looked at her like she was worth paying attention to, specifically.

"You should come to Singapore," Edward said, near the end of the meal. "I'm having the penthouse renovated. I think you'd have opinions about it."

"I'm sure I would," Ava said pleasantly.

He smiled — satisfied, certain. Josephine smiled too, from her end of the table, with the particular warmth of a woman watching something go according to plan.

After dinner, Ava stood on the terrace looking out at the dark water of Whitefish Lake while Edward took a call inside, and she thought: this is the life my mother built for me. This view. This house. This man with his penthouse in Singapore and his meetings in Missoula and his absolute certainty that I will, eventually, fall into place.

She thought about it for a long time.

Then she went inside, made her excuses, and went to bed.

She left Whitefish at eight the next morning, driving the fifty-four minutes back to Cedarville in the early light with the heels thrown on the passenger seat and her bare feet on the pedals and the window cracked just enough to let the cold Montana air in.

By the time her apartment building came into view she could breathe again.

She parked, climbed the stairs, unlocked her door, and stood in the middle of her small studio — her white sofa, her French press on the counter, her school bag by the door with tomorrow's lesson plans sticking out the top.

Hers.

All of it, completely and entirely hers.

She changed into pajamas, made herself a cup of tea, and sat on the balcony in the early morning listening to Cedarville wake up.

Edward Lim, she thought once more — his easy certainty, his penthouse, his mother-approved place in her future.

Then she let the thought go, like releasing something into the Montana sky — watching it drift away until it was too small to see.

She had school tomorrow.

She had coffee to look forward to.

And for now, that was more than enough.