THE BILLIONAIRE I USED TO KNOW

Chapter 15 — Her Father's Kitchen, Again

She showed up at her father's house past midnight, and to his credit, he didn't ask a single question until she was seated at the same kitchen table, wrapped in the same old blanket she'd used as a teenager, a mug of tea warming her hands that she had no real intention of drinking.

"He tracked me," she said finally, into the quiet. "For five years. Before the fundraiser, before any of this. He hired someone to look into my life, to make sure — I don't even know what, exactly. That I was doing all right. That I hadn't married someone else. That I still existed in a form he recognized."

Her father's face went through several expressions in quick succession — surprise, something like anger, and finally something more complicated that settled somewhere close to understanding. "That's not nothing to be upset about, Elena. You have every right to feel exactly the way you're feeling."

"I know that. I do. But—" she stopped, frustrated with herself, with the tangled mess of feelings that refused to sort themselves into anything simple. "I keep thinking about him at twenty-two, sitting outside our old house, too ashamed of what his family had become to knock on the door. And I keep thinking about how much of what he's done — all of it, the tracking, the buyout, even the marriage — comes from the same wound. A boy who lost everything and decided the only way to survive it was to make sure he never lost anything again, including me, even if that meant controlling every variable he could get his hands on instead of just trusting that things might work out on their own."

"That doesn't make it right," her father said carefully.

"No," she agreed. "It doesn't. But it makes it understandable, and those aren't the same thing, and I think I need to figure out which one actually matters more to me before I decide anything permanent."

Her father reached across the table and covered her hand with his own, weathered and familiar. "For what it's worth, sweetheart — and I recognize I'm hardly in a position to hand out relationship advice, given everything I did to that family twenty years ago — the version of that boy who sat outside our house too ashamed to knock doesn't sound like a man capable of engineering something as calculated as you're describing without also being terrified the entire time that he'd lose you the moment you found out the truth. Fear makes people do controlling things. It doesn't excuse it. But it might explain it, if you're looking for something to hold onto besides the anger."

Elena sat with that for a long time after her father went up to bed, alone in the quiet kitchen where this entire story — hers, Damian's, both families tangled together for two decades — had first been set into motion by a decision made at this very table.

Somewhere around two in the morning, her phone buzzed with a message from Damian. Not a plea, not another apology stacked on top of the last one. Just three words, sent without any expectation attached to them that she could detect.

Take your time.

She didn't respond that night. But she didn't delete it either, and she found herself reading it again before she finally fell asleep, turning the words over the way she'd once turned over a photograph of a boy she'd forgotten she'd loved.