PRICED BY MY BILLIONAIRE NEMESIS

Chapter Fourteen - The Math

The apples sit heavier in the plastic bag than four pieces of fruit have any right to. My fingers ache around the handles, and my pulse still has not steadied since the elevator doors closed on Adrian and his mother. I stop halfway down the corridor and pull air into my lungs like I am surfacing from somewhere deep underwater. The hospital lights buzz overhead, too white and too steady, like they are trying to expose every c***k I am holding together.

Of course he has a soft side. He just never spent a single ounce of it on me, not even on the days I begged him to look at me like I was a person. Eight years ago that man looked at me the way a banker looks at a bad investment, and today he was bending himself in half to keep a frail woman warm in a hospital hallway. I do not know which version of him hurts more to remember.

I keep walking, and I cannot push the image away. His hand curled around his mother's elbow like she was something he could lose in the next breath. The careful, glass-handler tilt of his fingers when he straightened her scarf. I shove it down because Mia is waiting, and Mia deserves a friend who is not currently coming apart at the seams over a man who chose a checkbook over her.

Mia is already in the room when I get there, small and tired in yesterday's clothes, hair piled into a knot that is slipping loose around her ears. She sees the apples and pulls me into a hug so fierce it forces the breath out of my chest. I let her hold me, because if I open my mouth right now I might say something I cannot take back. I let her believe I am the steady one, the dependable one, the friend who has her life together.

"Thank you. You're a lifesaver."

"How is she?"

Mia tilts her head toward the bed. "She woke up asking for apples. I swear she likes you more than she likes me."

Her mother is propped against the pillows, pale from anesthesia, but her smile is real when she sees me. She lifts a thin hand and beckons me close, calling me her beautiful angel in a voice still gravelly from the tube. For an hour I let myself disappear into her, peeling apples into thin curls and feeding her slow bites between stories about which nurses she liked and which she did not. Mia laughs, I laugh, and for sixty whole minutes I get to be a person whose biggest problem is which apple slice to cut next.

When visiting hours end, Mia's mother pats the back of my hand and tells me I am a blessing. Kindness has always hit me harder than cruelty, and I have to swallow twice before I can answer her without breaking. I kiss her forehead, squeeze Mia's hand, and promise to come back tomorrow. Then I step out into the corridor before either of them can see what is underneath my face.

The cold air outside slaps me back into my own body, and the second it does, Adrian is there again like he has been waiting under my skin the entire time. I think about the early years, before the checkbook, before the silence, when he used to tuck my hair behind my ear with that same careful hand. I had convinced myself I made that up. I had convinced myself the gentleness was something I invented to survive what he did to me afterward.

Mia told me once, back when she did not know who he had been to me, that he had built eight years of walls around himself. Eight years of working late and freezing people out and refusing to be touched by anything resembling tenderness. I used to take a savage comfort in that gossip, like it was proof I had cost him something too. Standing on the curb tonight, I understand the truth of it for the first time, and the truth is uglier than the lie I built. The walls were never about me. He kept the soft places alive. He just locked me out of them.

The bus pulls up and I board on autopilot, sinking into cracked vinyl by the window. I press my forehead to the cold glass and let the city smear past in streaks of orange light and gray shapes. The debt is still due, Jaden's message is still sitting unanswered on my phone, and Tuesday is still nine days away. None of that has shifted by so much as an inch.

What has shifted is smaller and worse. He saw me, and he did not tell her my name. That should have insulted me down to the bone, because the Adrian Vale I knew would have introduced me by my full name and ruined me with one sentence in front of his mother. Instead he shielded her from the knowledge of me, from the version of his life I belong to, the version with the checkbook and the silence and everything he traded me away for.

Eight years I have hated him cleanly. I have polished that hatred until it shines, slept with it under my pillow, and used it to get out of bed on mornings I did not want to. In twenty seconds in a hospital elevator he turned it into something I cannot name, and that scares me more than the debt does, because hatred is the only thing keeping me upright.

The bus rattles to my stop and I climb off into the dark, hands buried deep in my coat pockets, eyes on the cracked pavement. He does not know about Jaden. He does not know about Tuesday. He does not know that the same man who handed him the knife to gut us with eight years ago is already circling close enough to finish the job, and the worst part, the part I cannot make peace with, is that some buried stupid corner of me wants to warn him.

I climb the stairs slowly with the keys heavy in my hand. I unlock the door and step inside, and the warm smell of my mother's cooking wraps around me like a blanket I no longer feel entitled to wear. She calls from the kitchen and asks how my day was, and I open my mouth to lie smoothly, the way I have been practicing.

That is when my phone buzzes against my hip. The screen lights up with a name I have not let myself say out loud in eight years, and my whole body goes cold before I have finished reading the message underneath it.

Long day, sweetheart? You looked tired in that elevator. Didn't know you were making new friends in high places again. Eat something before bed. Tuesday will come fast. xxJ