THE BILLIONAIRE'S HIDDEN TRIPLETS

CHAPTER 4The Seventh Month

Elara

Months passed and I learned what it felt like to wait for something that never came.

I sent messages. Emails. Letters typed carefully at my kitchen table at midnight with my eyes hurting from the screen. I found every public contact address I could locate for Ashford Consolidated and I used all of them. I was not emotional in the writing. I did not beg. I stated the facts clearly, said what needed to be said, and signed my name at the bottom.

Nothing came back.

Not a response. Not an acknowledgment. Not even an automated reply telling me the message had been received.

I called the main office line twice. The first time I was transferred to a voicemail box that was full. The second time a woman told me politely that Mr. Ashford's correspondence was handled by his personal team and that general inquiries could be submitted through the website.

I had already submitted through the website.

Selene always had a reason.

"These people don't monitor general inboxes, Elara. It goes into a pile with thousands of other emails."

"My contact inside the tower is being careful. She doesn't want to draw attention to herself."

"Give it a little more time. If we push too hard too fast we risk him dismissing it before he even reads it properly."

I believed every single one of those explanations because they were reasonable and because Selene delivered them in that calm and certain way she had, the way that made the most frightening things feel manageable. I had trusted that voice for three years. I did not know yet how to hear it differently.

My stomach grew. My back started hurting in a way that woke me up at night. I kept working as many shifts as my body would allow and stopped when it told me clearly that it was done.

I bought a second-hand crib from a woman two streets over and spent an evening trying to assemble it alone in my bedroom before admitting I needed help and calling Selene, who came over with a screwdriver and her usual composure and had it built in twenty minutes.

We did not talk about Damien that night. We ate noodles from the container and she told me a story about something that happened at her office and I laughed for the first time in what felt like weeks.

I thought everything was going to be alright.

At seven months I collapsed in the hallway outside my apartment.

I had been carrying a bag of groceries up the stairs and the world simply went out from under me. I came back to consciousness on the floor with the groceries scattered around me and my neighbour Mrs. Okafor crouching beside me with her hand on my face saying my name over and over.

I woke up properly in a hospital bed with a drip in my arm and a nurse writing something on a clipboard at the foot of the bed.

"The babies," I said before anything else.

She looked up. "All three are fine. Good strong heartbeats. You were severely dehydrated and your blood pressure dropped. You need to rest and you need to drink water like it is your job."

I put my head back against the pillow and closed my eyes.

Selene arrived less than an hour later.

She came through the door with a bag over one shoulder and her coat still half on, like she had left wherever she was the moment she got the call and not stopped moving since. Her eyes went straight to me and I saw something cross her face that looked very much like fear.

"You scared me," she said, sitting down in the visitor's chair and reaching for my hand immediately. "Elara. You really scared me."

"I'm alright."

"You are not alright. You collapsed in a hallway."

"The babies are fine. The nurse said."

"I know. I asked at the desk before I came in." She squeezed my hand and did not let go. "You need to stop trying to do everything alone. You are seven months pregnant with three babies and you are carrying grocery bags up stairs by yourself."

"I didn't have a choice."

"You always have a choice. You can call me."

I looked at her. She looked back at me and her expression was so open and so genuinely worried that I felt the familiar pull of gratitude that had kept me trusting her all these months.

She stayed with me the entire week.

She brought food from the place on Clement Street that I liked, the one with the soup that came in portions big enough to split. She sat beside me while I slept and was reading when I woke up. She argued with a nurse on my behalf about the temperature of the room and won. She made the week feel survivable in the way that only she knew how to do.

She was perfect.

Looking back now I understand that she was performing. That she had something to protect and keeping me calm and grateful and dependent was the easiest way to protect it. But in that hospital bed at seven months pregnant and frightened, I did not see any of that. I just saw my best friend showing up for me.

When I was discharged and finally standing in real air again, something had shifted in me.

I had been patient for months. I had sent messages into what felt like a void and trusted that someone on the other end was doing something with them. I had let Selene manage the situation from a distance while I grew larger and slower and more tired and more scared.

I was done waiting.

"I'm going to tell him myself," I said. We were standing in the hospital car park and the afternoon was grey and cold and I did not care. "I'll go to the mansion directly. I'll wait at the gate if I have to. I'm seven months pregnant, Selene. I don't have more time to keep doing this the slow way."

She was quiet for a moment. Long enough that I noticed it.

"Are you sure that's a good idea?"

"Yes."

She looked at me carefully. Then she nodded once. "Okay. I'll drive you."

The Ashford estate sat at the end of a private road behind iron gates tall enough to make a point. The trees on either side of the approach were planted in perfect rows and the gravel driveway beyond the gates was raked so smooth it looked like no one had ever driven on it.

My hands were clasped in my lap and my heart was going too fast.

I was reaching for the door handle when the gates opened from the inside.

A long black car came through slowly and pulled around to the front of the house. The passenger door opened.

Selene stepped out.

I did not understand what I was seeing for a full three seconds. My brain kept rejecting it, rearranging the image, trying to make it into something that made more sense.

She was wearing a fitted dress. Her hair was done. Her makeup was flawless. And her stomach was round and full and unmistakably, obviously, visibly pregnant.

The air left my body.

A housekeeper came hurrying down the front steps with a smile so wide it took over her whole face.

"The future Mrs. Ashford is here!"

The words came through the glass of the car window like something from underwater. I heard them. I understood them. I sat completely still and watched my best friend press one hand to her stomach and smile at the housekeeper and I tried to remember how to make my legs work.

Two weeks ago she was not pregnant.

Two weeks ago we sat together in her kitchen and she poured tea and told me she was still trying to reach him.

I opened the car door.

I do not remember deciding to. My body moved before my mind had any say in it and then I was standing on the gravel in the cold with my own stomach heavy in front of me, staring at Selene across the distance between us.

She saw me.

Her face changed. Not dramatically. Not guiltily. It closed. Like a door being shut from the inside, calm and deliberate, and what was left on the surface was the expression of a stranger.

"That is not true!" My voice came out raw and too loud and I did not care. "Whatever she has told him it is a lie. I am the one who is pregnant with his children. I am the one who tried to reach him for months."

Selene turned to the housekeeper with an expression of quiet, patient sadness.

"She has been following Damien for some time," she said softly. "I am sorry you have to see this."

The housekeeper's face shifted. The warmth drained out of it. She looked at me the way people look at something that needs to be removed.

Security appeared from the side of the house. Two of them, moving quickly across the gravel.

"I am telling the truth!" I was crying now and I hated it, hated that my voice was breaking, hated that the tears made me look exactly like what she was telling them I was. "She stole this from me. She knew everything because I told her everything. Please, someone just listen to me. Please."

Nobody listened.

They took my arms and walked me back toward the gate and I kept talking the whole way because stopping felt like giving up the last thing I had.

Just before the gate closed between us, Selene appeared at my shoulder.

Close. Quiet. Her voice so low that only I could hear it.

"Some opportunities only come once, Elara." A small pause. "Thank you for giving me yours."

The gate shut.

I stood on the other side of it in the cold with her words sitting in my chest like something swallowed wrong.

And I finally understood that I had been alone this entire time.