THE BILLIONAIRE I USED TO KNOW

Chapter 7 — The Rossi House

Her father's voice on the phone sounded thinner than she remembered, like the last few weeks had aged him a full decade in the space of a month.

"You don't have to keep checking on me," Antonio Rossi said, though the relief in his voice when she suggested visiting gave him away completely, the warmth in it undercutting the protest before it had even fully left his mouth. "I'm fine, Elena. You have a whole new life to be worrying about."

"I'm coming Sunday. Don't argue with me, Dad. I've made up my mind."

She half expected Damian to object — some new rule about appearances, about what the wife of Damian Cole could and couldn't be seen doing in public, about optics and the careful narrative he seemed to be managing around their marriage at all times — but he only nodded when she told him over breakfast the next morning, distracted by something on his phone, his attention only half in the room.

"Take the car," he said, not looking up. "I'll have Marcus drive you."

"I can take a cab, Damian. It's not a state visit."

"Take the car, Elena." Something in his voice made it clear the conversation was over, and not, she noted with some surprise, in the cold way he usually closed doors on topics he didn't want to discuss. This felt different. This felt more like concern wearing the thin, unconvincing mask of an order, as if he genuinely worried about her taking a cab across the city alone and had no better way of expressing that worry than through logistics.

Her childhood home looked smaller than she remembered it, the way houses always do once you've spent even a short time living somewhere bigger, somewhere with higher ceilings and better light and none of the particular, accumulated warmth of a place that had actually been lived in for decades. Her father met her at the door looking exactly as tired as he'd sounded on the phone, the lines around his eyes deeper than she remembered from even a month ago, but his face broke into something warmer than she'd seen from him in weeks the moment he laid eyes on her standing on the porch.

"There she is." He pulled her into a hug that smelled like the same aftershave he'd worn her entire life, a scent so familiar it nearly undid her right there on the doorstep. "Married life treating you all right?"

"It's — complicated." She followed him into the kitchen, the same table, the same chipped mug he refused to replace no matter how many times she'd offered to buy him a new one over the years. "Dad, can I ask you something? And I need you to actually answer me. No dodging."

"Always, sweetheart. Ask me anything."

"Did you know Damian before? Before all of this — the offer, the buyout, the wedding. Did you know him when he was younger, when he was a teenager?"

Her father's hands stilled on the kettle for just a fraction of a second — so brief she might have imagined it under different circumstances, except she knew her father, had spent twenty-six years learning every one of his tells, and she knew exactly what that particular kind of stillness meant. It meant he was deciding, in real time, how much of the truth he could get away with telling her.

"Why do you ask?" His voice had gone carefully neutral, matching the stillness in his hands.

"Because he has a photograph of himself as a teenager locked in a drawer in his office, and he nearly took my head off when he caught me looking at it. Because he said something to me last night about losing everything when he was seventeen, and it sounded like it happened here, in this city, close to where we grew up, and I can't shake this feeling — this persistent, ridiculous feeling — that I've met him before, a long time ago, and I don't know why it won't go away."

Her father set the kettle down very carefully, with the exaggerated care of a man buying himself a few extra seconds. When he finally turned to face her, something had shifted in his expression — guilt, unmistakably, laid bare in a way she'd rarely seen from him, or the particular exhaustion of a man carrying a weight he'd hoped, quite desperately, never to set down in front of his own daughter.

"Elena." He pulled out a chair at the table, gesturing for her to sit with him, and lowered himself into the seat across from her like the conversation itself required physical bracing. "There's something I should have told you before the wedding. I didn't, because I told myself it didn't matter anymore, that it was ancient history, that dredging it up would only complicate an already impossible situation. I see now that was a coward's excuse, and I'm sorry for it."

Her stomach dropped, a cold, sinking feeling settling in before he'd even said another word. "Dad, you're scaring me."

"Twenty years ago, this company was smaller — your grandfather's company, really, I'd only just taken over the running of it myself, still finding my footing. There was a family we did business with. Suppliers, good people as I recall them, hardworking, decent — until a deal went bad through circumstances that were partly bad luck and partly, if I'm honest with myself after all these years, my own decisions. I made a choice at the time that saved Rossi Textiles and ruined them completely in the process." He wouldn't meet her eyes, staring instead at some fixed point on the table between them. "I told myself, at the time, it was just business. Just the way these things go. I've spent twenty years trying very hard to keep believing that, and I'm not sure I ever fully managed it."

"What family, Dad?"

Her father looked up at her then, finally, and in his eyes she saw the answer arrive a full second before he actually said it out loud, the way you sometimes see a storm on the horizon before you feel the first drop of rain.

"The Coles," he said, the name dropping into the quiet kitchen like something physical. "Elena, I ruined Damian Cole's family. Financially, completely, over a contract clause I used against them at the worst possible moment for their business. And I don't think for one second that it's a coincidence that he's the one who ended up buying mine, twenty years later, right down to the terms of the deal."