Derek stood in the stale air of Room 407, holding divorce papers like a man clutching his own confession.
Veronica grabbed his arm, nails biting through fabric. “We need to go,” she hissed.
But Derek couldn’t move.
Because the monitor’s beeping had followed Emma out, and in the sudden quiet, his thoughts became loud enough to crush him.
Richardson.
He had heard the name, of course. Everyone had. Richardson Technologies wasn’t a company; it was a weather system. It shaped economies the way storms shaped coastlines.
But Emma? His Emma?
The woman who clipped coupons.
The woman who drove a battered Honda.
The woman who worked in a library for fifteen dollars an hour.
Veronica yanked him again. “Derek!”
His body obeyed like a puppet. They walked down the hall. Elevators. Doors. The world continuing, rude and ordinary.
In the parking lot, Derek’s hands shook so violently he dropped his keys once. Veronica snatched them up and shoved them back at him, suddenly furious, suddenly frightened.
They drove.
Rain smeared the windshield like tears no one wanted to admit.
Veronica scrolled on her phone with frantic fingers, searching. Her earlier triumph curdled into panic with every passing second.
“Derek,” she whispered, voice thinning.
He glanced over. “What?”
Her face had drained of color. “Richardson Technologies,” she read, almost choking on the words. “Founded by Richard Richardson… telecom infrastructure… satellite networks… AI development… estimated net worth…”
Derek’s heart pounded.
“Eight hundred… and forty-seven billion,” Veronica whispered, the number sounding absurd, like a fairy tale with teeth.
Derek’s hands tightened on the wheel until his knuckles turned bone-white.
Veronica kept scrolling. “Richardson’s only child… Emma Catherine Richardson… disappeared from public life in 2019 after refusing an arranged marriage.”
The road tilted. The world shifted.
A photo loaded on her screen.
Emma, younger, hair styled differently, standing beside an older man with steel-gray eyes.
Emma’s eyes.
Derek’s vision blurred.
He swerved slightly, corrected, then pulled onto the shoulder like a man escaping a tidal wave.
“She… she worked at the library,” he said, as if repeating it could restore reality. “She wore thrift store coats.”
Veronica stared at him with something like disgust. “That’s not the point,” she snapped, and in her voice Derek heard the first true note of her character: not fear for Emma, not fear for the baby, but fear for herself.
Derek’s phone started ringing.
Unknown numbers.
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