The Billionaire Fell For The Widower

Chapter 6: Before

Lucas didn’t talk about the life before. Not to Comfort, who'd probably guessed pieces of it just from the way he spoke sometimes, too careful, too polished in certain sentences for a man who spent his days under sinks.

Not to Zuri, who was too young to understand it and, he hoped, would stay that way a while longer. Not even really to himself, most days — he'd gotten good at keeping the door of it shut.

But some nights it came anyway, uninvited, the way old things do.

Tonight it was the smell that did it — someone two doors down was frying something with too much thyme in it, and thyme had been Ann's thing, the one spice she put in everything whether it belonged there or not, and Lucas found himself sitting very still on the edge of the mattress with Zuri asleep beside him, letting the memory come instead of fighting it for once.

He'd been good at his job. That was the part people would never guess, looking at him now — that three years ago he'd sat in strategy meetings at Harrington & Partners with his tie straight and his opinions sharper than most of the men twice his age in the room, and people had listened. He'd been on track for partner. He remembered that with a kind of distance now, like it belonged to a photograph of a stranger rather than to his own life — a man in a good suit, confident in a way Lucas hadn't been confident about anything in two years.

He'd met Ann at a wedding neither of them had wanted to attend. She'd been the maid of honor, mildly drunk on the free champagne, delivering a toast that went on four minutes too long and made the whole room laugh anyway because she meant every overwrought word of it. Lucas had found her afterward by the drinks table and told her it was the best bad speech he'd ever heard, and she'd laughed at him — really laughed, head back, unbothered by who was watching — and something in his chest had simply decided, right there, that this was the woman he was going to marry.

Three years of that laugh. Zuri arriving loud and furious and perfect. A house that wasn't big but was theirs, evenings that Lucas used to complain were too short before he understood what "short" would come to mean.

Then the illness, fast and cruel in the particular way illnesses are when you're not remotely prepared for them. Six months from the first cough that wouldn't go away to the hospital room where he'd held her hand and she'd told him, with more calm than he'd ever managed since, to make sure Zuri knew how loved she was. Like that was a thing that needed instruction. Like he'd have forgotten.

He hadn't planned to leave the firm. That part still didn't sit easily in him, even now — a decision made in grief and exhaustion that had somehow become permanent. There'd been no one else. Ann's mother lived four hours away and had her own health to manage; his own parents had passed years before. Harrington & Partners didn't have a policy for a junior partner candidate who needed to leave by two every day and couldn't take client dinners and sometimes couldn't get out of bed either. He remembered the conversation with his managing partner with unusual clarity — the man's careful, sympathetic voice explaining that of course they understood, of course, but perhaps a leave of absence, and Lucas hearing underneath every word the real message, which was that grief was tolerable in small, contained doses and his wasn't staying contained.

He'd quit before they could ease him out slower and call it something kinder.

The plumbing thing had been almost an accident. His uncle had trained as one, years back, and taught Lucas enough as a teenager that he could fix a leaking tap without thinking about it. He'd fixed his own sink first, out of necessity, and then a neighbor's, and then discovered that this particular skill let him set his own hours completely, no meetings, no managing partner deciding what his grief was allowed to look like. Some mornings the humiliation of it — a Harrington & Partners almost-partner charging strangers a few thousand naira to fix their pipes — sat in his chest like a stone. Other mornings, watching Zuri eat breakfast across from him at their little plastic table, he thought it might be the only genuinely good decision he'd made since Ann died.

He hadn't told anyone the full shape of it. Not Comfort, not the families whose houses he worked in, not — he thought of her suddenly, unbidden — Vivienne Kingston, who'd looked at him at that gala like she could see straight through the plumber costume to something underneath it and wanted to ask about it anyway.

He didn't know what he'd tell her if she ever did ask outright. Some of it, maybe. Not the part where he still sometimes reached for his phone to call Ann about something stupid, forgetting for half a second, every single time, that there was no one on the other end anymore.

Zuri stirred beside him, murmured something about the fox in her story, and settled again.

Lucas sat with her a while longer, listening to the drip of the bucket in the corner, and let himself, just for tonight, remember the man he used to be — not with the collar and the sharp opinions in the room, but the one who used to believe that if you worked hard enough and loved someone enough, the ground under your feet would just... hold.

It hadn't held. He knew that now in his bones.

But some nights, sitting here with his daughter's breathing slow and even beside him, he let himself wonder — quietly, and only for a moment, because more than a moment felt dangerous — whether it might, someday, hold again.