Trapped In The Billionaire’s Name

CHAPTER 35

Damian's POV

The week before the hearing Celeste went quiet, no calls, no media, no counter-moves through her lawyers. Lena flagged it Tuesday morning with the tone of someone who knew silence was not the same as peace.

"She's done moving publicly," Lena said. "Her lawyers advised her. Anything she does now feeds our narrative going into the hearing."

"So she waits," I said.

"She waits and she hopes the judge finds something in the counter-motion documentation to create doubt." Lena closed her folder. "He won't. But she's playing the last card she has which is the possibility that he might."

"What's our exposure?"

"Minimal. Hume's correspondence is dated, authenticated, and specific. The estate amendment comparison is forensically verified by two independent accountants now." She paused. "We walk in clean."

I nodded. "Anything else?"

"The journalist piece on Reina runs Friday." Something shifted in her expression — not softness exactly but a slight adjustment in the professional register. "I read the draft. It's good. She gave a strong interview."

I knew she had. Reina had told me about it Thursday evening — the journalist, the two-hour conversation, the specific care she'd taken with the questions. She'd come home to my apartment after and sat at the kitchen island and said, "I think I said the right things," with the quiet certainty of someone who rarely doubted themselves and meant it when they said they didn't.

"She was honest about the unit," I said.

"Comprehensively," Lena said. "She talked about the funding model, the staffing approach, her clinical rationale for the design elements. She mentioned your father's original designation." A pause. "She didn't talk about the two of you personally. She didn't need to. The piece speaks for itself."

After Lena left I sat for a moment thinking about that.

Reina giving an interview that dismantled Celeste's conflict of interest framing by simply being exactly who she was, knowledgeable, credentialed, specific, and utterly without agenda. Not because we'd strategized it that way. Because that was her.

I sent her a text. “Lena read the draft. She said it's strong."

The response came quickly. I was between patients based on the timing.

"Good. I meant every word."

“I know you did. That's why it works.”

A pause. Then: “Seven days.”

“Seven days,” I confirmed.

“Don't let it make you tense."

“I'm not tense.”

“You get a specific posture when something important is close. Your shoulders.”

I sat with that for a moment. She'd noticed my posture from across tables and beside me on couches and in the particular geography of the last two months and had catalogued it with the same attention she gave everything.

“I'm fine,” I sent.

“I know you are. I'm just telling you I notice." Then: “Come tonight. I'll make dinner."

" It doesn't have to be—”

" I want to cook. Come at seven.

********************

She made her mother's soup.

Something with chicken and herbs that had clearly been simmering since before I arrived because the apartment smelled like it when she buzzed me in. She was at the stove when I came up, still in her work clothes, phone on the counter with a recipe she clearly hadn't needed to consult because her hands knew the sequence.

I sat at the island. Watched her finish it.

"The rice is in the pot," she said without turning. "Stir it."

I stirred the rice. We worked in the parallel quiet that had become the texture of evenings in her kitchen — near each other without requiring anything from the nearness except the fact of it.

"How was the ward today?" I said.

"Good. The girl with yellow as her favorite color — she's being discharged Friday." She said it without looking up but something in her voice carried it. The specific quiet pleasure of an outcome that had cost something to reach.

"Good news," I said.

"Yes." She turned the heat down. "She asked me this morning if I'd remember her after she left."

"What did you say?"

She turned to face me. "I told her yellow. Just said the word and watched her face." She paused. "She left my name on a piece of paper on her pillow before her parents took her for discharge prep." She looked at the counter. "To make sure I'd remember."

My throat was tight. I said nothing for a moment because nothing was the right response.

"She'll be alright," Reina said quietly. Not reassurance — she didn't do hollow reassurance. "She's resilient. I can see it."

"Like someone else I know," I said.

She looked at me. "Don't."

"You walked into an eighteen-month legal situation with no resources and no allies and kept your job and your brother and your mother's Tuesdays and yourself entirely intact." I held her gaze. "That's remarkable. I'm going to say it even when you tell me not to."

She looked at me for a moment with the expression that meant something had landed and she was deciding whether to show it.

"Soup's ready," she said.

We ate at the table. Properly — she'd set it with the small deliberateness she brought to things that mattered to her. The soup was extraordinary. I told her so.

"My mother made it every winter," she said. "Every Sunday without fail. The whole building smelled like it by noon."

"Did she teach you?"

"She didn't teach me. I watched until I knew it." She looked at the bowl. "That's how she was — she didn't sit you down and explain things. She just lived in front of you and expected you to be paying attention."

"You were paying attention," I said.

"Always," she said. "To everything."

She looked up at me then. The evening light was doing the thing to her face that it always did and I was so specifically aware of her — of all the things she was, of what it had cost her to get here, of what it meant that she was sitting across from me in her kitchen in her home with her mother's soup between us.

"Seven days," she said.

"Seven days," I said.

She reached across the table. Put her hand over mine.

"We're almost there," she said.

"We're almost there," I confirmed.

Her hand was warm and certain and she didn't move it for the rest of the meal.