The Billionaire's Eighth Widow

Chapter 5

Ivy read the headline a fourth time before she let herself close the laptop, and even then the words stayed lit up behind her eyes in the dark, the way stage lights used to linger long after she'd walked off into the wings.

Vetting process already underway.

She didn't know exactly what that meant - didn't know if it meant interviews, or introductions, or some quiet, invisible screening process happening entirely behind closed doors she'd never get near - but she knew, with the same instinct that used to tell her a phrase in a piece of music was about to resolve, that whatever it meant, it meant a door was open right now that wouldn't stay open forever. Grief had taught her that doors closed. Rosalind had taught her, in the end, that some of them closed permanently, without warning, while you were three phone calls too busy to notice.

She wasn't going to let this one close on her.

Ivy opened the laptop again and started where she always started lately: research. If Lucien Ashcroft was looking for a wife, he wasn't posting an ad. Men like that didn't need to. But men like that also didn't exist entirely off the grid - they had calendars, public ones, filled with the specific performative generosity of old money trying to look good in front of cameras. Ashcroft Holdings sponsored things. Hospital wings. Scholarship funds. A youth orchestra program, she found after twenty minutes of digging, that the family had quietly funded for over a decade, the kind of philanthropy that photographed well and cost the family less than the catering at their own galas.

And there, three clicks deep into the Ashcroft Holdings public relations page, buried under a press release about a new office tower, she found it: the Ashcroft Family Foundation's annual spring gala, six weeks out, a black-tie fundraiser for the arts program the family had built its softer public image around. Tickets started at four figures. The kind of event where the guest list mattered more than the cause, where old money mingled with new money mingling with the specific, curated presence of people the family wanted seen standing next to them.

If Lucien Ashcroft was going to be anywhere public while quietly vetting an eighth wife, it would be there. A room built entirely around the illusion of goodness, full of women exactly like the seven who'd come before - polished, photographed, unknowingly auditioning.

Ivy sat back from the laptop, and the calculation that had been running underneath her excitement since the moment she'd read the headline finally surfaced into words she had to say out loud, alone, to her empty apartment.

"I can't afford this."

Four thousand dollars for a ticket. That was before the dress, before the shoes, before whatever her hair and face would need to look like she belonged in that room instead of like a woman who taught violin to bored twelve-year-olds to make rent. She had, at last count, six hundred and forty dollars in her checking account and a rent payment due in four days that would take most of it. The gala might as well have been on the moon.

She almost let the thought sink her right there - almost let the old, familiar undertow of you can't, you never could, that world was never built for people like you pull her back down into the same numbness she'd been swimming against for seven months. She caught herself doing it and stopped, the way you catch your own bow drifting flat on a long note, correcting before anyone in the audience could hear the mistake.

You don't need to buy your way in, she told herself. You just need a reason to already be there.

She thought about it for the better part of an hour, turning the problem over the way she used to turn over a difficult passage of music, looking for the fingering nobody else had tried. A ticket was a wall. But galas like this needed more than guests. They needed music.

She sat up straight.

The Ashcroft Family Foundation funded a youth orchestra program. A gala built around celebrating the arts wouldn't just seat four hundred donors at round tables and call it a night - it would want a moment. A string quartet during cocktail hour. A featured young soloist during dinner, some prodigy plucked from the very program the foundation funded, trotted out to remind the room exactly what all that money was supposedly for.

Ivy had spent four years at conservatory before the money ran out. She still had contacts there, even if she hadn't used most of them in longer than she wanted to admit out of something that was half pride and half the specific shame of being the one who hadn't made it. And there was one name in her old contacts list she hadn't deleted, no matter how many times she'd told herself she should, because some part of her had always known she might need it someday.

Dr. Eleanor Voss.

Not a relation to the Ashcrofts - a different Eleanor entirely, an old conservatory patron who'd funded Ivy's tuition for two years before the scholarship money dried up along with everything else, a woman who'd once told a nineteen-year-old Ivy, backstage after a recital, that she had "the kind of ear that gets wasted in rooms too small for it." Dr. Voss sat on the boards of half a dozen arts foundations in the city. If anyone would know who was curating musicians for an Ashcroft Foundation gala, it was her.

Ivy's hand hovered over her phone for a long moment before she made the call, because calling Eleanor Voss meant admitting, out loud, exactly how far she'd fallen since the last time they'd spoken - a debt-buried violin teacher instead of the rising talent Eleanor had once bet her own reputation on.

She called anyway.

"Ivy Calloway." Eleanor's voice came through warm and a little surprised, no trace of judgment in it, which made the years of avoidance feel foolish in retrospect. "Goodness. I was starting to think you'd fallen off the earth."

"Close to it." Ivy kept her voice light, the way she'd learned to keep everything light when she needed something from someone. "I have a strange favor to ask, and I promise I'll explain someday why it matters so much."

"I do love a mysterious favor. Go on."

"The Ashcroft Foundation gala next month - I heard they usually feature a young musician from the youth program during dinner. I wanted to know if that's still true, and if there's any chance you could put my name forward."

There was a pause on the line, brief enough that Ivy almost filled it with an apology before Eleanor spoke again, her voice gone careful and curious in a way that told Ivy she'd already guessed there was more to this than a career opportunity.

"That's a very specific request, Ivy."

"I know."

"You haven't performed publicly in - what, seven years now?"

"I know that too."

Another pause. Ivy could hear, faintly, the sound of Eleanor moving through her own home, a door closing somewhere, the particular quality of quiet that meant she'd stepped somewhere private to finish this conversation properly.

"I'm not going to pretend I don't know whose event that is," Eleanor said finally. "Or that I haven't heard the rumors about what happened to your sister. I'm sorry, Ivy. I should have called when I heard."

"You don't need to apologize."

"I'm going to help you anyway, because I trust that you know what you're asking for, and because I've never once known you to do something reckless without a reason underneath it worth respecting." A rustle of paper, the sound of Eleanor already reaching for something - a calendar, a contact list, the machinery of a woman who got things done for a living. "I can put your name forward for the dinner performance. I can't promise they'll say yes. But I can promise they'll take the call, and I can promise you'll get an audition slot, which is more than most people ever get near that family."

"That's more than I was hoping for."

"Just - Ivy." Eleanor's voice had gone quieter, more serious, the tone of a woman who'd watched enough young musicians self-destruct over the years to recognize the shape of someone standing near a ledge. "Whatever this is really about, be careful. That family has a way of swallowing people whole."

Ivy closed her eyes, thinking of seven photographs pinned to a wall, of a diary entry that ended mid-sentence, of a man standing at the edges of every single frame.

"I know," she said. "That's rather the point."

By the time she hung up, something in her chest had shifted from anxious to something colder and steadier - not hope, exactly, but its more useful cousin: momentum. She had a door now, even if it wasn't fully open yet. She had a way into that room that didn't require four thousand dollars she didn't have, that required instead the one thing she'd spent a decade building without ever intending to use it this way: the ability to make a violin say something true in front of strangers.

She spent the next four days practicing until her fingers ached in a way they hadn't in years, dusting off pieces she'd shelved after conservatory, rebuilding calluses that had softened during a decade of teaching scales to children who'd never care the way she once had. It felt, strangely, like coming back to herself - not the self who taught Mason Cho his wrist position for rent money, but something older and more essential underneath that, the part of her Rosalind used to say she'd recognize even in a crowded room, just from the sound.

Eleanor called back on the fourth day. The foundation had agreed. Ivy would perform a single piece during dinner, a modest slot near the evening's close, but a slot nonetheless - a violin, a spotlight, and a room that would contain, somewhere inside it, the man she'd built an entire wall out of trying to understand.

She should have felt triumphant. Mostly, standing in her kitchen with the phone still warm in her hand, she felt something closer to vertigo - the particular dizziness of watching a plan she'd built in the abstract suddenly acquire a date, a time, a real and irreversible shape.

The gala was six weeks away. It felt, somehow, both impossibly far and terrifyingly close.

She spent those weeks the way she'd spent every week since the package arrived - teaching by day, practicing and researching by night, the wall in her apartment growing more crowded, her sleep growing thinner. Diane called twice; Ivy let both calls go to voicemail, promising herself she'd call back once the gala was behind her, once she had something real to explain instead of a theory Diane would only try to talk her out of. Priya texted more than she called, careful, gentle check-ins that Ivy answered with just enough warmth to keep the silence from becoming a wound, and just enough distance to keep the whole truth exactly where it had been for six weeks now - locked away, out of reach, hers alone to carry.

The night before the gala, Ivy laid out the dress Eleanor had helped her borrow from a costume house that owed the older woman a favor - deep navy, simple, the kind of elegant that didn't announce itself the way the room's real money would - and sat down at her desk to run through the piece one final time in her head, bow arm twitching faintly against her side the way it always did the night before a performance.

Her phone buzzed. An email notification, no subject line, from an address that meant nothing to her - a string of random characters, the kind of anonymous account built specifically to disappear the moment it was used.

Ivy's stomach dropped before she'd even opened it. She knew, with total, cold certainty, exactly what kind of message came from an address like that.

She opened it anyway.

There was no greeting. No signature. Just a single line of text, the same careful, deliberate hand she recognized instantly from a folded note that had arrived weeks ago tucked inside her sister's diary - different medium, same unmistakable author.

He'll be standing near the east terrace doors at 8:15. Alone, for exactly four minutes. That's your window. Don't waste it.

Ivy read it three times, her pulse loud enough in her ears to drown out the dry cleaner's sign buzzing faintly through the floor below.

Someone was still watching her. Someone who knew, before she'd told a single living soul, exactly which gala she'd be attending tomorrow night - knew, with an intimacy that went far beyond public knowledge, precisely where Lucien Ashcroft would be standing and for how long.

Whoever had sent her sister's diary hadn't stopped watching after that first warning.

They were still inside the house. And they were, for reasons Ivy couldn't begin to guess at, still trying to help her get in.