Trapped In The Billionaire’s Name

CHAPTER 43

Damian's POV

Wednesday she left a book at my apartment.

Not deliberately — I found it face down on the nightstand on her side, a novel she'd been reading in chapters before sleep. She texted at noon when she noticed it was gone from her bag.

Did I leave my book?

I looked at it. Yes. It's on the nightstand.

Don't read it. I'm in the middle.

I wasn't going to read it.

You were absolutely going to read it.

I looked at the book. I looked away. I'll bring it Thursday.

Thank you. Then after a pause: What page am I on?

I picked it up. Told her.

*LYou read it.

Three pages. The writing is good.

The response took a moment. Then: I knew it. Stay out of my book, Damian.

I smiled at my phone in an empty office like someone who had completely lost their professional composure and had no objections.

Lena walked in, read my face, and walked back out without saying anything.

Thursday I brought the book.

She was off at four and met me outside and took it from me with the mock severity of someone who had already forgiven the transgression and was enjoying the performance of not having done so.

"Three pages," she said.

"The opening was strong."

"The opening is the best part and now you've had it."

"I'll buy you another copy."

"It's not about the copy." She put it in her bag. "It's about the principle."

"What principle?"

"Books are private," she said. "Like journals."

"You keep a journal?"

She looked at me. "No. But if I did you wouldn't read it."

"Obviously not."

"Good." She fell into step beside me. "Three pages though. On a work day."

"It was lunch."

"You don't have lunch."

"I took it Wednesday." I looked at her. "The prose style reminded me of the way you talk when you're tired. Direct and a little unsentimental but with something warm underneath."

She was quiet for a moment. "That's a very specific observation."

"You have a specific effect on my attention," I said.

She looked ahead. The tell — jaw slightly tight, something received and being placed somewhere it could be kept.

"Where are we going?" she said.

"Nowhere specific. Walk first?"

"Walk first," she agreed.

We ended up in a bookshop.

Her choice — we passed it and she slowed without stopping and I said *go in* and she did without requiring more invitation. It was the kind of independent bookshop that had survived by being indispensable to its neighborhood — crammed, warm, organized by a logic that wasn't alphabetical but clearly meant something to whoever maintained it.

She moved through it the way she moved through the hospital. Like she knew the architecture and had a destination even when she was browsing. She pulled books out, read the first page, put some back and kept others. I followed and watched and learned something new about her — the speed of her intake, the things that made her pause versus the things she moved past, the particular attention she gave to openings.

"What are you looking for?" I said.

"I'll know it when I find it." She put one back. "What do you read?"

"Mostly non-fiction. History. Architecture theory."

"Not novels?"

"Occasionally. Less than I should."

She pulled a book off a shelf and handed it to me without looking up. "Start with this one."

I looked at it. A novel. Author I didn't recognize. "Why this one?"

"Because the person who wrote it understands how people actually talk to each other. Not how writers think people talk." She moved to the next shelf. "You'll like it."

I looked at the back cover. "How do you know what I'll like?"

"Because you listen to people when they talk and you notice when the language is real versus when it's performed." She glanced at me briefly. "This book does that. You'll recognize it."

She knew me the way I knew her — specifically, quietly, from sustained attention. The realization of it landed the same way every time.

I kept the book.

At the register she added three to my one and paid before I could. I looked at her.

"Don't," she said pleasantly.

"Reina."

"It's four books. I have a salary." She took the bag. "You can buy dinner."

"I always buy dinner."

"Then we're balanced."

The logic was entirely her own and entirely consistent and I'd stopped trying to argue with it because she was right in the way she was usually right — quietly and completely.

We ate at a Thai place she knew that had six tables and a hand-written menu and had apparently been on her rotation for three years. The owner knew her order.

"You're a regular," I said.

"I live nearby. It's good food and they don't pretend the portions are smaller than they are." She unfolded her napkin. "I value that in a restaurant."

"No performance," I said.

"Exactly." She looked at me. "Like certain other things."

"What other things?"

"You," she said simply. "You don't perform. You just are what you are and you expect the same from everyone else." She paused. "I noticed that early."

"What did you think of it early?"

"I didn't trust it," she said. "I assumed it was a refined version of the same performance. Just more sophisticated." She picked up her water. "It took me a few weeks to understand it was actually just — you."

"When did you understand that?"

She thought about it. "The building," she said. "When you showed me the space and you talked about the quiet room. You weren't selling anything. You were just thinking out loud about what it could be." She paused. "That was the first moment I thought — this person is exactly what he appears to be."

"Was that frightening?" I said.

"Yes," she said. "Because I didn't have a defense for it."

I looked at her across the small table. The restaurant was warm and the evening was easy and she was looking at me with the open expression she kept for moments when she'd decided honesty was worth the exposure.

"I didn't have a defense for you either," I said. "From the first morning."

"The coffee outside the hospital," she said.

"Before that," I said. "The divorce papers. The straight face. The morning shift." I paused. "I drove away from your apartment that first day and sat in traffic for twenty minutes thinking about someone I'd known for ten minutes."

She looked at me steadily. "What were you thinking?"

"That I'd just met someone who was going to change everything." I held her gaze. "I was right."

Her expression did the thing. The composure is fully transparent, something deep and real underneath.

She reached across the small table and touched my face briefly. One moment, her hand was on my jaw. Then back to her water.

"Eat," she said softly.

I ate. She smiled at the table.

The four books sat in the bag by her chair and the restaurant was warm and the evening asked nothing of us and we stayed until the owner started putting chairs on tables and even then we were slow about leaving.