After the divorce

Chapter 6:The Billionaire Kneels

It took Damien four days to work up the nerve to go to Hart Manor, and even then, he told himself the entire drive over that he was only going to apologize — a simple, contained conversation, the kind of thing a man could manage in fifteen controlled minutes before returning to the rest of his life.

He should have known better. Nothing about Amelia Hart, he was quickly learning, was going to be simple or contained ever again.

The gates alone made that clear. Wrought iron, twelve feet high, flanked by a guardhouse with two uniformed officers who looked at his car with the polite, immovable disinterest of men who had turned away far more important people than him.

"I'm here to see Amelia," Damien said, rolling down his window. "Damien Blackwood."

One of the guards checked a tablet, unhurried. "Mr. Blackwood," he said, in a tone that suggested the name meant something specific and not particularly favorable. "You're not on the approved visitor list."

"I don't need to be on a list. I'm her—" He stopped himself before he could say husband, the word suddenly foreign and inaccurate in his mouth. "I need to speak with her. It's important."

"I'm sorry, sir. Mr. Hart's instructions were explicit." The guard's tone stayed perfectly professional, which somehow made it worse. "You'll need to turn your vehicle around."

Damien sat there for a long moment, gripping the steering wheel, feeling something he rarely felt anymore — the particular, unfamiliar sting of powerlessness. He was used to being the man other people couldn't get past. He wasn't used to being on the wrong side of that equation.

He was still sitting there, weighing whether to argue further, when a sleek black car came gliding down the manor's long drive from the opposite direction, slowing as it approached the gate.

Through the tinted glass, he caught a glimpse of her.

Amelia sat in the back seat, composed and still, dressed in something structured and pale that made her look every inch the heiress the headlines had crowned her. For one long moment their eyes met through the glass, and Damien felt something in his chest lurch violently toward the door handle, toward getting out, toward saying something, anything, before the moment passed.

She didn't stop the car. She didn't even really look at him — not the way a woman looks at a man she still feels something for, not even the way a woman looks at a man she still hates. She looked at him the way she might look at a stranger standing on a street corner, present in her field of vision for exactly as long as it took the car to pass, and gone from it the moment it didn't.

The window on her side lowered, just a few inches, just long enough for her voice to reach him, cool and level and utterly without weight.

"Mr. Blackwood," she said. "We have nothing to discuss."

The window rose again before he could answer. The car continued down the drive and through the gate that opened smoothly for it, and closed just as smoothly the moment it passed through, leaving Damien standing outside it in a way that felt, for the first time in his adult life, entirely and permanently locked out.

He drove home in silence. He didn't turn on the radio. He didn't call anyone. He simply drove, replaying the two seconds of eye contact over and over, trying to find something in it he could hold onto, and finding nothing at all.

Sophia was waiting when he got back, as she so often was lately, though something about her presence had started to feel less like comfort and more like a low, persistent static he couldn't quite tune out.

"How did it go?" she asked, and there was something too careful in the question, something that didn't match the genuine warmth she used to be able to fake so effortlessly.

"She wouldn't even stop the car," Damien said, dropping onto the couch and pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. "I don't think she's ever going to forgive me."

"Maybe she doesn't need to," Sophia said. "Maybe you should let this go. You have a company to run, Damien. A life to rebuild. You can't keep chasing a woman who's made it very clear she's moved on."

Something about the ease with which Sophia said it — the readiness, as though she'd rehearsed the line in advance — made Damien lower his hands and actually look at her, really look at her, for what felt like the first time in weeks.

"Why does it matter so much to you," he said slowly, "whether I let this go?"

Sophia's smile faltered, just for a fraction of a second, before she recovered it. "Because I care about you," she said. "That's all."

Damien didn't answer. But somewhere underneath the grief and the guilt that had taken up permanent residence in his chest since the night of the accident, a new and colder thought was beginning to form — one he wasn't ready to say out loud yet, not until he understood it better himself.

That night, unable to sleep, he pulled up the old messages between himself and Sophia, scrolling back further than he had in months, past the point where their friendship had apparently, invisibly, tipped into something else. He found a message from four months earlier, sent late at night, that he'd barely registered at the time: Don't worry. I'll take care of everything. You just have to trust me when the time comes.

He read it three times. He didn't remember what he'd said in response, if anything, but the timestamp sat there like an accusation — four months before the papers, four months before the photographs, four months before a story had arrived on his desk fully formed and ready to destroy the one thing he should have protected without question.

He didn't confront her that night. He told himself he needed proof first, something more solid than a single ambiguous message and a feeling he couldn't fully name. But he closed his laptop with his jaw tight and his hands unsteady, and he didn't sleep again until well past dawn.