My Ex-Husband's Regret: The Billionaire's Return

Anderson's fingers tightened around the envelope until the paper creased. He sank back onto the sofa, the cushions exhaling beneath his weight. His eyes burned. His skull throbbed. The apartment's silence pressed against his eardrums like water pressure at depth. His consciousness began to slip. Not sleep. Something more invasive. The exhaustion of grief pulling him backward, into memory, into the last time he'd felt this particular species of pain. Rain. The sound resolved first. Heavy, relentless, drumming against fabric. Then the cold, seeping through his thin black suit, climbing his spine. He was standing in grass turned to mud, watching water pool in the carved letters of a headstone. Calhoun. His father's name. Anderson turned. Elianna stood ten feet away, sheltered beneath a black umbrella large enough for three. Her dress was designer, her heels sinking into the sodden earth. She was looking at her BlackBerry, thumb moving across the keyboard. "You missed it." Anderson's voice came from somewhere distant, somewhere younger. "He asked for you. At the end. He kept saying your name." Elianna didn't look up. "I was closing the Meridian deal. The hospice bills were forty thousand dollars a day. Someone had to pay them." "Pay them?" Anderson stepped out from beneath the inadequate shelter of the funeral home's awning. Rain soaked his hair, his shoulders, ran down his collar in icy rivers. "He died alone, Elianna. He died asking where his daughter was, and you were-what? In a conference room?" "Don't be naive." She finally raised her eyes. They were the same gray as his own, but harder. Colder. "Tears don't cover medical debt. Presence doesn't keep the collection agencies away. I did what was necessary." "Necessary?" Anderson's hand found the BlackBerry. He didn't remember moving. The device was in his palm, then against the wet grass, screen shattering with a sound like ice breaking. The cousins and distant relations gathered nearby gasped. Someone said his name in a scandalized whisper. Elianna looked at the ruined phone. Then at him. Her hand moved faster than he could track. The slap snapped his head sideways, rocked him back on his heels. His mouth filled with copper. He touched his lip, came away with blood mixed with rain. "You're cut off." Elianna's voice was level, conversational. "No more family money. No more family name. If you want to play the moral martyr, do it on your own dime." Anderson spat red onto the grass. "Fine." He turned. Walked. The rain swallowed the sound of her voice calling after him, or maybe she hadn't called at all. He didn't look back. He walked until his shoes filled with water, until he reached the road, until a bus splashed him with gutter runoff and he laughed because it didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered. Anderson's eyes opened. The apartment ceiling stared back at him, white and blank and dry. His cheek rested against the sofa arm. The envelope had fallen to the floor. He sat up slowly, feeling fifteen years settle back onto his shoulders. His left hand rose, touched his cheek where Elianna's palm had landed. The skin remembered. The nerves remembered. He'd been wrong. The realization came quietly, without drama. He'd been twenty-two, furious and grieving, desperate for someone to blame. Elianna had made herself the perfect target. Her coldness, her efficiency, her refusal to perform the emotions he needed from her. But she'd paid the bills. She'd kept their father comfortable. She'd carried the weight he'd been too young, too proud, too stupid to see. And now she was gone. And he'd never told her he understood. Never told her he was sorry for the things he'd said, the years he'd wasted, the family he'd thrown away because his pride demanded a villain. Anderson stood. His legs were unsteady. He walked to the bookshelf, the one by the window, and knelt before the bottom shelf. His fingers found the box pushed behind rows of books he never read. Cardboard, dust-coated, forgotten. The photograph inside showed two children on a beach. Ten-year-old Anderson, skinny and sunburned, grinning at the camera. Fifteen-year-old Elianna behind him, her arm draped over his shoulder, her own smile wide and unguarded and real. Before. Before their mother retreated to Florida. Before their father got sick. Before money became weapon and shield and the only language any of them knew how to speak. Anderson's thumb traced his sister's face. The glass covering the photograph fogged with his breath. "I'm sorry," he whispered. The words hung in the empty apartment, unanswered. The wall clock chimed. Nine-thirty. Anderson flinched. The weekly senior staff meeting. Raven would be expecting him, would have already compiled her list of failures and inadequacies to review in front of the team. He should call in. Should explain that his sister was dead, that he couldn't- He couldn't stay here. The thought came sharp and clear. He couldn't spend another minute in this apartment with its ghosts and its silence and its envelope full of demands. He needed noise. Structure. Distraction. He needed to be someone else for a few hours. Anderson moved. Shower, cold enough to sting. Suit, navy, the one that fit like armor. He grabbed his trench coat, his eyes catching the dark smears of motor oil he'd wiped on it hours ago. He couldn't wear that. Not today. He shoved it into the back of the closet and pulled out a clean charcoal overcoat instead. He had to look the part. He avoided the mirror, avoided his own eyes, focused on the mechanical process of becoming presentable. The envelope went into the wall safe, behind the landscape painting. The combination was his father's birthday. He didn't think about why as he spun the dial. The door closed behind him with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence.