THE BILLIONAIRE'S ANONYMOUS WIFE

CHAPTER FIVE

LUCIAN'S POV

I don't know why I said it out loud to Margo. I don't say the real things out loud, not usually I learned a long time ago, in a house that was never mine, that the real things are safer, kept behind glass, admired from a distance but never touched, never risked.

But the letter in my coat pocket has been burning a slow hole through the wool all night, pressed against my chest like it wants to be discovered, and somewhere between the fourth handshake and the fifth glass of champagne I didn't actually want, standing in a room full of people who all want something from me, I needed to hear it exist outside my own skull.

Needed proof I wasn't imagining the way four sentences from a stranger had unmoored something in me I thought I'd bolted down for good, years ago, in a room that smelled like someone else's laundry detergent.

Elena's face, when I catch her in the hallway, does something strange.

Something guilty, flickering across her features too fast for her to hide it completely, gone before I can name it properly.

I tell myself it's nothing.

My wife isn't guilty.

My wife barely does anything at all where I'm concerned a fact I've never examined too closely, because examining it would mean admitting whose fault that silence is, and I've built an entire empire, brick by brick, on never examining the things that might implicate me.

"You heard that," I say again, when she doesn't answer, watching her throat move as she swallows, her eyes not quite meeting mine.

"I heard you're getting letters," she says finally, carefully, like she's picking her way across broken glass, choosing each word like it might cut her.

"That's all I heard."

I study her a second too long, longer than I usually allow myself, longer than three years of careful distance has trained me to.

There's a version of tonight where I push her why her hands are trembling slightly at her sides, why she won't quite meet my eyes, why some unfamiliar part of me feels like I'm standing in front of a locked door I don't have the key to and never bothered to ask for one, not once, in three whole years.

But that's not who I am.

I don't chase mysteries in my own house.

I chase them in boardrooms, in spreadsheets, in things that resolve into numbers I can control and win, things that don't require me to sit still long enough to feel anything uncomfortable.

"It's nothing," I say, echoing her own favorite word without even realizing I've borrowed it.

"Forget I mentioned it."

We ride home in silence, the way we always do her by the window, watching the city blur past in streaks of gold and red, her reflection ghosted over the glass like a second, quieter version of her sitting just outside the car, me on my phone pretending to read something urgent when really I'm just avoiding the strange, restless static in my own chest, the thing I don't have a name for and don't want one.

But my mind keeps circling back, again and again, no matter how many emails I scroll past without reading, to the letter sitting in my desk drawer at the office.

Four sentences that undid something I thought had scarred over years ago, back when I was still young enough to believe scars could actually heal instead of just closing over the wound and waiting.

I hope somebody asks you soon.

Nobody has asked me anything real in longer than I can remember with any accuracy.

Nobody except, apparently, a stranger who signs nothing and somehow, impossibly, knows everything knows the exact shape of the thing I carry around all day and sets down only when I think the house is asleep.

That night, alone in my study with the city lights spread out below the window like scattered coins, the ice in my untouched drink long since melted, I take out the letter again and read it for what must be the twentieth time, my finger tracing the loop of the handwriting the way I imagine a blind man reads braille, hunting for meaning in the shape of it.

Then, almost without deciding to, I open the drawer beneath it the one I never open, the one I sealed shut in my own mind years ago along with everything else from that part of my life and pull out an old shoebox I had shipped from the Sterling estate long ago and never once opened, not once, not in fifteen years.

Letters. Fifteen years old, the paper has gone soft and yellowed at the edges, some of them creased so many times along the same lines they're nearly falling into sections.

From a girl who signed herself only Wren.

I don't know why I've kept them all this time.

I told myself, back then, that I'd thrown them away, that a boy who wanted to survive his new life couldn't afford sentiment for a girl he'd never met and would never meet again.

Apparently some part of me lied to the rest of me for fifteen years.

My hand is actually shaking, tonight of all nights, as I hold them next to the new letter on my desk, a heavy black Montblanc still uncapped beside them, forgotten mid-signature on a contract I haven't looked at in an hour, comparing the shape of two sets of handwriting fifteen years apart, the slant of certain letters, the particular way both writers pressed down hard on the words that mattered most, like the pen itself needed convincing.

I tell myself it's impossible.

Fifteen years and a hundred miles and an entirely different life stand between a grieving boy's pen pal and a stranger writing to a stranger in the city he became.

I tell myself a lot of things I don't believe anymore, and haven't for longer than I'd like to admit, not since a woman I barely know started writing me the truth in a handwriting that feels, somehow, unbearably familiar.

I pick up my phone and call my head of security, the clock on my desk reading well past midnight, the apartment silent around me except for the distant hum of the city through double-paned glass.

"I need you to find someone for me," I say, my voice steadier than I feel, steadier than any part of me actually is right now. "Discreetly. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes. I want to know who's sending these."

On the other end of the line, Reyes asks, carefully, who.

I look down at the letter in my hand, at four sentences that somehow know me better than my own wife ever has in three years of marriage, and I say the only thing I'm certain of tonight, the only truth I have left to hold onto in a study full of things I've spent years refusing to look at directly:

"I don't know her name yet. But I'm going to find out who she is, even if I have to take my own life apart to do it."

I hung up.

The shoebox sits open on my desk, two sets of handwriting lying side by side like a question I'm not ready to answer.

What I don't know, what I have no way of knowing yet, is that the woman I'm hunting is asleep four doors down the hall, close enough that if I only crossed the hallway and listened, I could have my answer tonight, could have had it years ago, if I had ever once thought to ask.