THE BILLIONAIRE'S FORGOTTEN WIFE

The Note She Wasn't Supposed to Read

POV: Elena

Elena waited until Dr. Ferris had come and gone — a brisk, kind woman who checked her pupils, asked her to squeeze both hands, and confirmed what Elena had already suspected in the sinking pit of her stomach: normal physical recovery, textbook reflexes, and a two-month memory gap that "may resolve gradually, or may not resolve at all." Elena had nodded through all of it with the particular calm of someone conserving her real reaction for later, when she was alone.

She waited until Damian left to "make some calls" — his phone had buzzed twice in his pocket during the doctor's visit, and something about the second buzz had changed his face in a way he clearly hadn't meant for her to see. She waited until the door clicked shut and the corridor outside had gone quiet, footsteps fading, before she finally let herself breathe.

Then she unfolded the note.

The paper was soft, worn at the crease like it had been folded and unfolded several times before it ever reached her palm — which meant the woman, whoever she was, had been carrying it for a while, waiting for a moment exactly like this one. The handwriting was small, slanted, urgent in the way handwriting gets when someone is writing fast and doesn't trust themselves to write it twice.

Elena — if you're reading this, it means I ran out of time to tell you in person, and I'm sorry for that. You don't know me. My name is Rosalind Cho. I've been your care nurse for three weeks, but that's not why I'm writing this.

Two days before your accident, you came to see me. Not as a patient — as a friend of my sister's, from the Voss & Associates office. You said you'd found something in the merger files you were auditing and you didn't know who to trust with it. You said you didn't want to bring it to Damian because you weren't sure yet if it involved him.

You gave me copies. I still have them. I haven't given them to anyone because I don't know who's safe to give them to — and because three days after you handed them to me, you were in a hospital bed and I got a call from someone I didn't recognize telling me to forget I ever spoke to you, or my sister would lose her job. Maybe worse.

I don't think your accident was an accident, Elena. I think you found something somebody was willing to hurt you to keep buried. I'm scared, and I don't know who else to tell, and I know that's not fair to put on you when you don't even remember your own life right now. But you're the only person who might know what to do with what I have.

Ask for me by name if you need me. Don't ask anyone else first. I don't know who else is involved.

— R.

Elena read it twice. Then a third time, her thumb pressed white against the edge of the paper, her heartbeat loud enough that she could feel it in the fresh scar above her eyebrow.

*You found something in the merger files.*

She had no memory of merger files. No memory of a woman named Rosalind Cho, or a sister at Voss & Associates, or a phone call threatening someone's job. But something about the sentence — *you didn't want to bring it to Damian because you weren't sure yet if it involved him* — landed with a strange, unsettling weight, like a word in a language she'd forgotten she used to speak.

She folded the note back along its original creases, small and precise, and looked around the room for somewhere to hide it. Under the mattress felt too obvious. In her hospital gown pocket felt too easy for a nurse to find during a routine check. In the end she tucked it into the inner sleeve of the paperback novel sitting untouched on her bedside table — a book someone, presumably Damian, had brought for her to read during a coma she'd had no chance to appreciate it in — and told herself she'd find somewhere better later.

She was still staring at the cover of that unread book, her mind turning the note over and over, when a second knock came at the door. Softer than Damian's. Almost hesitant.

"Come in," Elena called, already braced for it to be him again, already feeling the strange, exhausting effort of having to perform composure in front of a man who apparently knew her better than she knew herself.

It wasn't Damian.

It was a woman around her own age, dark blonde hair pulled back messily, wearing jeans and a blazer that looked thrown on in a hurry, holding a coffee cup in each hand like a peace offering.

"Okay, before you panic," the woman said, already talking as she pushed the door shut behind her with her hip, "I know you don't remember me, the nurse called ahead and warned me, so I'm not going to make this weird by expecting a hug. I'm Sophie. Sophie Reyes. I've been your best friend since sophomore year of college, I run ops at your dad's firm — well, *your* firm now — and I brought you the good coffee because hospital coffee is a war crime and I refuse to let you suffer through it on top of everything else."

Elena blinked. There was something immediately, disarmingly familiar about the rhythm of her — not a memory exactly, more like muscle memory, the way her shoulders loosened half an inch at the sound of this woman's voice without her permission.

"Sophie," Elena repeated slowly, testing it the way she'd tested Damian's name, and found — for the first time since waking up — a faint, ghostly warmth attached to it. Not a memory. Just a feeling, like the outline of one, traced in charcoal and smudged.

"That's a start," Sophie said, and something in her face softened with visible relief as she set one coffee cup down on the tray table and sank into the chair beside the bed like she'd sat in it a hundred times before. "Okay. I know you have approximately four hundred questions and none of them are going to be answered by hospital coffee, but I figured you'd rather hear the truth from me than from the tabloids, because — fair warning — the tabloids already have a headline ready."

"A headline."

"'Billionaire's Bride Wakes From Coma.'" Sophie made a face. "It's not subtle. Nothing about your husband's family is ever subtle."

Elena's fingers tightened slightly around the coffee cup Sophie had handed her. "You keep saying husband like it's just — a fact. A normal fact."

"Because it is. Was. Is." Sophie sighed, dragging a hand through her hair. "Look, I'm not going to lie to you, El — it's complicated, and I promised Damian I'd let him explain the complicated parts, which, frankly, I think is a terrible plan because that man communicates emotions the way a Wall Street Journal headline communicates emotions. But I can tell you the important part, which is: it started as one thing, and it became something else. And whatever you don't remember about the something-else part — it was real. I watched it happen. I was there."

"What do you mean it started as one thing?"

Sophie's expression flickered — the smallest hesitation, gone fast, but Elena caught it the same way she'd apparently caught Damian's flinch earlier, because apparently reading people for the lie underneath the sentence was a skill the accident hadn't managed to take either.

"That's really his to tell," Sophie said carefully. "I don't want to get it wrong and make it worse."

"Sophie."

"I mean it, El. It's not my story to tell first." Sophie held her gaze, and there was something pleading in it now, something that looked almost like guilt. "Just — give him the chance to say it before you hear it from someone else. Okay? Please. For both your sakes."

Elena thought about the folded note tucked into the sleeve of an unread paperback four inches from Sophie's elbow. Thought about a woman named Rosalind Cho, terrified enough to write a warning and slip it into a stranger's palm before she'd even said hello. Thought about you didn't want to bring it to Damian because you weren't sure yet if it involved him.

She thought about how many people in her life, apparently, already knew more about her marriage than she did — and how every single one of them seemed to be asking her to wait for someone else's version of the truth before she formed her own.

"Sophie," Elena said slowly, watching her friend's face for the reaction, "does the name Marcus Cross mean anything to you?"

The coffee cup in Sophie's hand went very still.

"Why," Sophie said, and her voice had changed completely, gone flat and careful in a way that made Elena's pulse pick up, "would you ask me that?"

"Because I don't know," Elena said. "I don't know why I asked. It just — came out. Like something I already knew and forgot I knew."

Sophie set the coffee cup down slowly, deliberately, on the tray table, and when she looked up, there was something in her expression Elena hadn't seen from anyone yet since waking up — not caution, not careful diplomacy.

Fear.

"You need to talk to Damian," Sophie said quietly. "Today. Before you talk to anyone else. Before you remember anything else on your own." She stood up so fast the chair scraped against the floor. "I have to go. I have to — I need to make a call."

"Sophie, wait—"

But Sophie was already at the door, already halfway into the corridor, throwing one last look back over her shoulder — an expression Elena would spend the rest of the day trying to decode, caught somewhere between I'm sorry and be careful — before the door swung shut behind her and left Elena alone again, one name heavier than she'd been ten minutes ago, and no closer to understanding why it had felt like pulling a pin from something that had been waiting, quietly, to go off.