THE BILLIONAIRE I USED TO KNOW

Chapter 6 — Old Ground

The dreams started that night, though dreams wasn't quite the right word for them — more like fragments surfacing from somewhere she'd sealed off years ago without meaning to, the way a house settles over decades and buries a room nobody remembers was ever there. A boy on a bicycle, pedaling too fast down a hill that smelled like cut grass and chlorine. A summer that stretched on the way summers only do when you're young enough not to know they end. A name she couldn't quite catch before it dissolved into morning light, slipping through her fingers the harder she reached for it.

She woke before her alarm, unsettled in a way she couldn't fully explain, and lay in the enormous bed in the enormous room in the enormous apartment that still didn't feel like hers, staring at the ceiling and trying to chase the fragments back down into something coherent. They wouldn't come. All that remained was a feeling — warm, familiar, aching in a way that had no obvious source — attached to nothing she could name, like the ghost sensation of a limb she wasn't sure she'd ever had.

She lay there for a long time before finally giving up on sleep entirely, pulling on a robe and padding down the long hallway toward the kitchen, past the closed door of Damian's office, past the guest room she'd never once seen anyone use, past a wall of black-and-white photography that she now suspected, looking at it with new eyes, contained not a single image of him before the age of twenty-five. As if the first seventeen years of his life had simply been edited out of the record, replaced with polished glass and expensive silence.

Marta found her still in the kitchen an hour later, staring at her coffee like it might have answers the rest of the apartment refused to give her.

"Rough night, Mrs. Cole?"

"Strange one." Elena wrapped both hands around the mug, grateful for the warmth of it. "Marta, can I ask you something? How long have you worked for Mr. Cole?"

"Eight years, come spring." Marta moved efficiently around the kitchen as she spoke, wiping down a counter that didn't need it, the practiced busywork of someone who liked having her hands occupied during conversations that felt like they might go somewhere uncomfortable.

"Did you know him before he was — this?" Elena gestured vaguely at the apartment, the view, the entire architecture of the life he'd built. "Before all of it? Before he was Damian Cole, billionaire."

Something careful crossed Marta's face — the look of a woman who'd been paid well and long enough to know exactly where the lines were drawn, and who had no intention of stepping over them for anyone, no matter how much sympathy she might privately feel. "I knew him when he was already building the company. Already had the first few million, the first real deals under his belt. Not before that. You'd have to ask him about before, dear. That's not my story to tell."

"I have asked him. He doesn't answer. He just — closes the door and asks me to wait a year."

Marta's expression softened, just slightly, the corner of her mouth curving into something that was almost sympathy but stopped short of actual disclosure. "Give him time, Elena. He's not a man who trusts easily, and I don't say that lightly — I've watched him not trust a great many capable, trustworthy people over the years, out of habit more than judgment. If he's letting you ask at all, if he's letting the question sit in the room instead of shutting it down entirely, that's not nothing. That's more than most people get."

It wasn't the answer Elena wanted, but it was, she suspected, the only honest one she was going to get from anyone currently employed in this apartment. She thought about the photograph again — the boy outside the small brick house, laughing at something out of frame, a laugh she was starting to suspect she'd have recognized instantly if she'd heard it out loud instead of only seeing it frozen in a photograph — and wondered, not for the first time since she'd found it, whether the fragmented dream and the hidden photograph were somehow the same unfinished thought trying to surface from two entirely different directions at once, converging on something she wasn't ready to name.

She didn't see Damian again until that evening, and when she did, he was different — guarded in a new way, like their conversation on the terrace the night before had cost him something he was now actively trying to recoup, brick by careful brick. He was polite over dinner. Distant in a way that felt deliberate rather than simply preoccupied. The wall she'd watched c***k open the night before, however briefly, had been rebuilt with what looked like real effort, and she hated how much it stung to watch him do it in real time, right in front of her, like he was performing the reconstruction specifically so she'd understand exactly how thoroughly the door was closing again.

"You're quiet," he observed, halfway through the meal, not quite meeting her eyes.

"So are you."

"I have a call with Singapore in an hour."

"Of course you do." She pushed a piece of food around her plate without eating any of it, appetite gone. "Damian. Last night—"

"Was a mistake," he said, too quickly, cutting her off before she could even finish the sentence, the words coming out clipped and final in a way that felt more like self-protection than actual conviction. "I said more than I meant to. It won't happen again."

The words landed like a slap, sharper for how gently he said them, delivered without malice but no less wounding for it.

"Fine," she said, standing before he could see her face fall, before the hurt could fully register on her expression and give him something to feel guilty about. "Enjoy your call."

She didn't look back to see whether he watched her leave the room, though some traitorous part of her hoped, against her better judgment, that he did — that at least some part of him was as reluctant to let the door close as she suddenly, inexplicably, found herself to be.