The Billionaire Secret Heir

Chapter 2: Arithmetic

Elena closed the door, and the click it made was so soft that Adrian wished she had slammed it.

She did not come back to the table. She stood with her back against the glass wall and the harbor behind her, one hand gripping the strap of her bag, and the ferry out on the water had nearly reached the far pier by the time either of them spoke.

"Where did you get this?" he asked, holding up the compass.

"I found it on a nightstand, in a hotel room, on a morning I was in a hurry to leave," she said. "I meant to mail it back. I wrote your name on three different envelopes, and every time I got to the part where I had to write the address, I understood that you wouldn't open anything from me."

"That is not an answer to the question I'm about to ask."

"Then ask it."

He had practiced a great many hard conversations in his life, with boards and lawyers and a grandfather who treated warmth as a tax, but nothing he had rehearsed covered this. His voice came out flat and careful, the way it did when he was afraid of what a room might do with it. "Is he mine?"

Elena looked at him for so long that he heard the air handling system cycling somewhere in the ceiling.

"He's mine," she said. "He has been mine since the day he was born, and I raised him on my own and I'll go on raising him on my own. You asked me once what I wanted from you, and I'm still not sure you'd like the answer, which is nothing. You can keep your questions."

"Elena."

"That's the first time you've used my name," she said, "since you told me to get out of your suite."

He had not told her to get out, not in those words, and he opened his mouth to say so, and then he remembered the exact tone he had used and shut it again. She held out her hand, palm up, and it took him a moment to understand that she wanted the compass.

He did not want to give it to her. That surprised him more than anything else that had happened in the last ten minutes, how strongly his fingers resisted, as though the thing had been missing so long that letting go of it twice was more than he could manage. He laid it in her palm anyway. It was Noah's now, in some way he could not yet put a name to, and he was not going to take a child's possession and call it his own.

"Priya has your number from the application," he said. "She'll call about the position."

"I withdrew."

"You did, and I didn't accept it."

She almost smiled, and he saw her stop herself. Then she opened the door and went out to look for her son, and he stood in the empty room with his hand still half raised, listening to her heels fade down the corridor.

The next ten minutes happened to him rather than around him. He watched from the glass wall of the corridor as the elevator doors parted on the lobby level, where the woman he assumed was the friend with the croissant was waiting with a paper bag and a worried face, and the small boy took his mother's hand and let himself be steered out through the revolving door. At no point did the boy look back, and Adrian found that he minded this too.

Priya found him still standing there. She had been his assistant for six years, long enough to know when he wanted conversation and when he wanted coffee, and she put a cup in his hand without a word and waited.

"His birthday," he said. "Did he tell you?"

"He told me quite a lot in the elevator." She hesitated, which Priya almost never did. "September twelfth. He turned five a few weeks ago, and he had a cake shaped like a lighthouse, and Maya burned the first one. He was very clear about the burning."

September twelfth. Adrian did the sum without wanting to, the way a man glances at a wound to see whether it has stopped bleeding. A gala on the fourteenth of December, a winter that had ended with him signing off on a Singapore acquisition and refusing to think about anything else, and then a spring and a summer in which a woman he had accused of lying had apparently been carrying his child. Nine months, give or take a week. He put the cup down because he did not trust his hand with it.

"Sir, I don't want to presume," Priya said, "but you've gone quite gray."

"I want everything we have on Elena Carter. Her application, her references, her address, where the boy goes to school. Nothing leaves this office, and nobody outside the two of us is told why you're asking."

"Mr. Kessler recommended her. He's sat in on every meeting about the Harbor project, so he'll hear about it if I pull the file through procurement."

"Then don't use procurement. Use what you have."

She was gone for twenty minutes. He spent them at the window with the compass's absence still in his hand like a phantom weight, thinking about the years he had spent trying to remember what he had said to her that morning, and about how badly he had needed it to be true. The email printouts had been so thorough, and the call from the family office so apologetic, and he had been thirty-one and certain of himself, which he now understood was the most dangerous way a person could be.

Priya came back with a tablet and a face he had never seen on her before, tight and watchful, the face of someone who has opened a drawer and found it was not empty.

"The application is straightforward," she said. "References check out, address is in Larkfield, no criminal history, no debts that would worry me, apart from a notice on her rent that I suspect is why she came. There's no father listed for Noah on the preschool forms. It just says unavailable."

"And the rest."

"There's an archive record." She turned the tablet so he could see. "It's attached to her name, but it isn't part of the application. It was created in February, five years ago, and it's locked under Foundation Records clearance, which I don't have, and which you only have in theory because the Foundation reports through the Trust. I couldn't open it. I could only see that it exists."

"Five years ago, February." He kept his voice level by sheer effort. "I never authorized a record on her."

"I didn't think you had." She slid her finger down the screen. "Here's the part I didn't like, sir. It has an access history. For five years nothing, and then this morning at seven-forty, one hour and twenty minutes before her interview, somebody opened it from a Foundation terminal on the thirtieth floor."

"Who?"

"The terminal doesn't record a name, only a location. It could be any of eleven people who share that floor." She lowered the tablet, and for a moment she looked younger than he had ever seen her. "Somebody knew she was coming, Mr. Blackwell. Somebody wanted to see that file before you did.”