THE BILLIONAIRE’S TEMPORARY WIFE

Chapter 5:The Silence My Father Left Behind

Ethan's pov

I had spent my entire life believing my father was the strongest man I knew. Watching him trapped in silence was the first time I realized even powerful men could become powerless.

The company didn't slow down to let me grieve the version of him I'd lost. If anything, it sped up, like every executive in the building had been waiting for a c***k to appear before they started testing how far it went.

I told myself it didn't matter what they thought. My father built this company by ignoring people who doubted him, and I intended to do the same.

The strangest part of my life, though, wasn't happening at the office. It was happening in my own house.

It was Richard's room that unsettled me the most. Everyone who walked into that room did it with the same careful, pitying softness, voices pitched low like they were in a church instead of a bedroom. I did it too, if I was honest.

Zara didn't do any of that. I heard her from the hallway one evening before she noticed me. "You would not believe the seating chart Ethan's been fighting with all week," she was telling him, like he could answer, like the conversation actually went both ways. "Four times, Richard. He's rearranged it four times. I told him nobody at that gala is going to riot over where Victor Ashford sits, but does he listen to me?"

I almost smiled despite myself, standing there unseen. She kept going, oblivious to me. "He gets this look when he's stressed, you know. Like he's personally offended by the seating chart. I think he'd rather negotiate a hostile takeover than pick a tablecloth color."

I stood in that hallway feeling like an intruder in my own home.

Three days after I overheard that conversation, the Kestrel shipping deal collapsed overnight, a contract we'd spent five months negotiating, gone the moment our competitor undercut every term we'd fought for down to the decimal.

"They knew our numbers," I told the room, standing at the head of the table in an emergency meeting nobody wanted to be in. "Not estimates. Exact figures. That information was known by six people in this building."

Silence. Nobody wanted to say a name out loud.

"Is it possible," one of the board members finally offered, "that the numbers were guessed? Competitors do run parallel models…"

"Nobody guesses a contract down to the decimal," I cut him off. "Someone handed this to them."

Daniel found me afterward in my office. "I'll look into it," he said. "Personally. I'll find out who's talking."

"Someone inside my own company is selling us out, Daniel."

"I know." He sat across from me, elbows on his knees. "You don't have to carry everything alone, you know. Let me help."

"Why would anyone do this now," I said, more to myself than to him. "Right when everything else is falling apart."

"Maybe that's exactly why," Daniel said. "People smell weakness fast in a place like this. Somebody's making a move while you're distracted."

"Then I need to stop being distracted."

"Or," he said carefully, "you need better eyes in places you can't watch yourself. I mean that as a friend, not just as your business partner."

"Thank you," I said, and meant it.

I came home earlier than usual, too tired to pretend another hour at the office would fix anything. I expected the house to be quiet; instead I found Zara sitting outside my father's door, her knees pulled up.

She stood the moment she saw me, quick, like she'd been caught at something.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"I was visiting your father," she frowned.

"Why?" I repeated.

"Because he's alone," she said, simple as that, like it was the most obvious answer in the world.

"You don't owe him company. This isn't part of what you agreed to."

"I know what I agreed to," she said, a little sharper now. "I didn't realize kindness needed to be in the contract for me to be allowed to have it."

That stopped me. "That's not what I meant."

"Then what did you mean?" She folded her arms.

I didn't have a good answer, so I said nothing, and she seemed to take pity on the silence. "He likes hearing about ordinary things," she said, softer. "It doesn't have to mean anything, Ethan."

She excused herself not long after, murmuring something about an early morning, and I stood outside his door a while longer before I went in.

He was awake. "You want to tell me something?" I asked, pulling a chair.

His eyes moved. Left, then a fixed point, then back to me, desperate in a way that made my pulse pick up.

"Is it about the clause?" I asked, watching his face for anything. Nothing. "The company? Gerald?"

Nothing changed. Just that same fixed, frustrated stare.

"I don't understand," I told him, and hated how helpless it sounded out loud.

Back in my office that night, I found a folder waiting on my desk, the same trust documents Gerald had first shown me weeks earlier. I hadn't looked at them since that first read, too furious and too rushed to do anything but confirm the clause was real.

Tonight I opened the folder again and read every line slower, more carefully, the way I should have the first time.

I found the signature page. My father's signature, exactly as Gerald had described. My eyes moved automatically to the date stamped beside it, the kind of detail I would have skimmed past on any other night.

I stopped.

I read it again to be sure I hadn't misread it.

The clause hadn't been part of the original trust agreement drafted years ago, the way I'd assumed without ever bothering to check. It had been added eighteen months ago.

Months, not years, recently enough that somebody specific in the office, close enough to my father got hat signature exactly when they needed it.

My jaw tightened as the pieces I'd been refusing to connect finally locked into place.

This marriage was never just about saving the company from technicality.

Someone had planned this, known exactly what would happen when Richard collapsed, had positioned the pieces months in advance so that the moment he went down, I would have no choice but to fall directly into a trap built with legal precision.

I sat there with the folder open in front of me, one question burning through everything else in my mind. "Who wanted me to become a husband?”