THE BILLIONAIRE'S ANONYMOUS WIFE

CHAPTER TWO

ELENA'S POV

The restoration studio is the only place in this city where my hands feel like they belong to me.

It's nothing special to look at, a narrow room above a secondhand bookshop on a quiet side street in the Village, its front window still hand-lettered in flaking gold paint that reads ESTABLISHED 1961, smelling of leather and old glue and the particular dust that only comes from paper that's outlived several owners, several centuries of hands turning its pages.

There's a cracked skylight that leaks a little when it rains, and a radiator that clangs like a warning bell every time it kicks on, and I love every imperfect inch of it more than I love anything in the forty-two rooms I go home to.

Here, nobody calls me Mrs. Sterling. Here, I'm just Elena, the woman with steady hands and a good eye for matching thread to a hundred-year-old binding, the woman other people trust with the fragile, irreplaceable things they can't fix themselves.

I spend the morning re-gluing the spine of an 1884 field journal for a client who doesn't know his great-grandfather's handwriting is the most honest thing I've touched all week small, cramped letters recording weather and crop yields and, once, tucked between two entries about rainfall, a single line that stops me every time I turn the page: Miss my wife something fierce today.

No explanation.

No context.

Just a man, dead for over a century, admitting something in ink he probably never said out loud to the woman he missed.

I trace the words with my gloved finger and think, not for the first time, that paper keeps the truths people are too afraid to speak.

Old paper doesn't perform. It doesn't have a public face and a private one, the way people do. It tells the truth and waits, patiently, sometimes for a hundred years, for someone to finally believe it.

My phone buzzes against the workbench, rattling a jar of brushes and nearly toppling a bottle of archival adhesive. A text from Julian.

Divorce paperwork is ready whenever you are. No rush. But also, no rush shouldn't turn into forever, El.

I stare at it until the words blur into shapes I don't recognize anymore, my thumb hovering over the screen like it's something hot.

Julian's been my friend since college, back before I was "Mrs. Sterling," back when I was just Elena who cried too easily during economics lectures and he'd slide his coffee across the table without asking why, like it was the most natural thing in the world to notice someone struggling and do something small about it.

He sat with me the day my mother's diagnosis came in, three hours on the cold linoleum of a hospital hallway without saying a single unnecessary word.

He's the only person who knows I've been carrying divorce papers folded in my bag for six weeks like a woman carrying a knife she isn't sure she's brave enough to use sharp enough to end something, heavy enough that just holding it wears her hands out by the end of the day.

I text back: Soon.

It's the same word I've used for six weeks.

I wonder if he's started keeping a private tally somewhere, the way I keep count of the forty-two rooms.

You keep saying that, he writes back almost immediately, like he was waiting. One day "soon" has to actually mean something, El.

You deserve a life that isn't a waiting room.

I don't answer that one. I set the phone face-down on the workbench and go back to the field journal, because some truths are easier to hold when your hands are busy with someone else's.

That night I go home early to drop off dry cleaning and, on a whim I can't fully explain, find myself standing in front of the hallway closet I haven't opened since I moved in three years ago.

The door sticks a little, swollen with humidity, and I have to yank twice before it gives.

I dig past the ballet shoes I never wear anymore, the ribbons gone stiff and gray, past photo albums full of a mother's smile I still can't look at directly without my throat closing, until my fingers hit a shoebox tied with string, and something in my stomach drops before my brain even catches up to why it should matter.

Letters from Hawk.

I sit down right there on the closet floor, knees pulled to my chest, the hem of my sweater catching dust, and untie the string like it might bite me.

Fifteen years old.

A grief pen-pal program my school ran after my mother passed it was a program that paired a lonely kid with another lonely kid somewhere else in the district, no names, no faces, just two mailboxes and whatever truth you were brave enough to put on paper and trust a stranger to catch gently.

My Hawk wrote about a house that didn't feel like his, about people who fed him and clothed him and never once asked what he was afraid of at night, about a bed in a room that belonged to someone else before him and would probably belong to someone else after.

I wrote back about a mother who used to hum while she cooked, off-key and unashamed, and a silence now so loud it filled every room of our apartment like water rising past the doorframes.

We wrote for eight months. I remember the exact weight of his letters in my hand, always a little heavier than mine, like he pressed the pen down harder when he meant something, like the paper itself had to work to hold what he was saying.

One line still catches in my throat fifteen years later: I don't think anyone would notice if I disappeared. Except maybe you, and you don't even know my name.

I cried reading that one, alone in my childhood bedroom, and wrote back the longest letter of the whole correspondence, telling him he mattered, that somewhere a girl he'd never met was glad, every single day, that he existed.

Then his letters just stopped.

No goodbye.

No explanation.

Just gone, the way the people who matter most to us tend to vanish without asking permission first, without giving us the chance to say the things we would have said if we'd known it was the last time.

I haven't thought about him in years. Not really. Not on purpose. Grief has a way of burying things under newer griefs, and mine has had plenty to bury him under since.

My hands are shaking now, holding paper from a boy who probably grew into a man who forgot me completely, who has a whole life somewhere that never once wondered what happened to the girl who called herself Wren, who maybe doesn't even remember her name was Wren at all.

I return the box to the closet with careful, reverent hands, the way you return something borrowed that was never quite yours to keep.

The door sticks again on the way shut, the way it stuck on the way open, as if the whole apartment resents letting go of anything once it's been disturbed.

I go to my room, and before I can talk myself out of it, before the sensible, tired part of me can catch up and stop my hand, I write my second letter, to the husband who has no idea his wife spent an hour tonight crying on a closet floor over a stranger from a decade and a half ago, over the terrifying thought that two different loneliness might be the same, wearing different faces, walking around in different cities, aging into different men.

I seal the envelope with Lucian's office address printed carefully on the front, my handwriting steadier than my heart, which is doing something erratic and foolish in my chest.

I don't hear the front door open downstairs.

I don't hear the elevator chime, or the footsteps on the marble, too lost in my own head, in the strange dizzy feeling of having reopened an old wound and finding it hadn't healed the way I thought it had.

I'm halfway down the hall, envelope in hand, when Lucian rounds the corner home three hours early, tie already loosened, carrying something heavy on his face that he hasn't found anywhere to set down and stops dead when he sees the envelope in my hand.

"What," he says, in that voice that makes junior executives forget how to speak, the voice that has closed a hundred-million-dollar deals without ever once rising in volume, "is that?"