All Chapters of THE USELESS HUSBAND'S BILLION DOLLAR REVENGE : Chapter 1
- Chapter 10
13 chapters
The Surprise
"Elena. Elena, please. Just listen to me for one second."The phone went to voicemail again.Ethan Cross pressed the device against his ear until the recorded greeting finished, then he slowly lowered it and stared at the bunch of roses in his other hand. Twenty-four red roses. He had counted them at the shop, one by one, because the florist had told him that twenty-four meant devotion, meant forever. He had believed her.He stood at the bottom of the steps leading up to Crestwood Tower, the glass and steel building where Elena worked, where she had poured the last three years of her life into building SkyBridge Technologies from nothing into something the whole city was talking about. He had stood beside her through every late night. He had eaten cold rice because she forgot dinners. He had repaired their secondhand washing machine with bare hands at two in the morning so she could have clean clothes for investor meetings. He had never complained.Tonight was their fourth anniversary
The Call
His apartment was cold when he got back.Not the kind of cold that needs a thermostat turned up. The other kind. The kind that lives in a space when the person who used to fill it is gone.Elena had moved most of her things to the penthouse in the Vane Building six weeks ago. Ethan had told himself she needed to be closer to the office during the launch period. He had told himself a lot of things over the last year the way a person keeps adding small sticks to a fire that is already dying, hoping volume will substitute for heat.He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the room. Her half of the wardrobe was empty. The nightstand on her side had nothing on it except a ring of dust where her water glass used to sit. The reading lamp was still there because she had bought it but he had fixed it twice, rewiring the switch both times so it would not flicker, and somehow in the sorting of belongings that happens at the end of things, it had stayed behind.He did not turn it on.He r
Sable
She was already on the phone when he walked into the restaurant, and she did not put it down when he arrived at the table.Ethan stood for a moment, looking at her. The photograph he had found online had prepared him for the features but not for the quality of attention she was paying to whatever was happening on that phone call. Her full focus was contained in that small rectangle of glass and metal, and everything else in the restaurant, the other tables, the noise, the server waiting nearby with a water jug, even Ethan himself, existed in a kind of peripheral irrelevance.He sat down across from her.She held up one finger without looking at him. One moment.He unfolded his napkin and laid it across his lap."No," she said into the phone. Her voice was flat and final. "That price doesn't work for us. If they want to revisit by Thursday we'll talk. If not, pull the offer." She listened for three seconds. "I said pull it." She set the phone face-down on the table.She looked at him.
The Garage
He was under a Volvo at seven-fifteen the next morning when Pete slid a cup of coffee along the concrete floor to where his feet were sticking out."Big night?" Pete said.Ethan rolled out from under the car on his board, sat up, and picked up the coffee. Pete was fifty-one, built like a fire hydrant, and had been running Crossroads Auto for twenty-two years. He was also the man who had given a nineteen-year-old Ethan a job when nobody else would, and had then spent the next six years teaching him everything a formal engineering education would have taught him and several things it would not have."Different night," Ethan said.Pete studied him. He did not say anything for a moment. He had the quality of a man who had raised three children and therefore knew when to ask and when to wait."Elena?" he said finally."Signed the papers last night."Pete sat down on a stool and picked up his own coffee. He looked at the middle distance. "Right," he said."It's fine," Ethan said."I know it
Elena Reacts
"Find him."Elena Cross said it with her back to the room, looking out at the city from the floor-to-ceiling windows of her office on the thirty-ninth floor. Her assistant, a twenty-four-year-old named Claire who had learned in her first week that Elena's instructions always meant something more precise than the words suggested, stood very still near the door."You mean locate his current address?" Claire asked carefully."I mean find out everything." Elena turned from the window. In the morning light she looked like she had not slept, which she had not, but she wore that the way she wore everything, as information rather than vulnerability. "Where he's working. Who he's been talking to. Whether that message from Helion Capital was the first contact or the latest.""I'll need to know which message you mean," Claire said."I went through his personal email last year while he was at work." She said it without hesitation and without shame. "He gets his work account forwarded there. There
The Better Attorney
"Her name is Joan Fisk."Sable said it across the phone without preamble, two minutes after Ethan picked up."Good morning," he said."Good morning. Joan Fisk. She handles IP litigation for four of the largest tech companies in the country. She is expensive, she is blunt to the point of being alarming, and she has never lost a case that mattered. I am texting you her number now." A pause. "Call her this morning.""You said yesterday I should let you recommend without choosing," he said.A brief quiet. Then: "I said you should use the recommendation rather than let me choose it for you. That is what I am doing. The choice is still yours." Another pause. "But call her this morning."He was sitting at his kitchen table with a cup of tea and a legal pad on which he had written a list of twelve questions during the night. He looked at the list now."What should I say to her?" he asked."Tell her you have a patent that is about to be attacked and you need it defended at commercial scale. Te
Old Debts
His mother called while he was on the bus home.He picked up on the first ring, because he always did when it was her."You didn't call," she said."I know, Mom. I'm sorry. It was a complicated night.""I heard from Elena." A pause, filled with all the things his mother was choosing not to say. "She said you gave her the papers."He leaned his head back against the bus seat and looked at the fluorescent light above him. "She called you?""She did. This morning. She was crying."He was quiet."I didn't know what to say to her," his mother continued. Her voice was careful. Not angry, not sad. Just careful, in the way of a woman who has raised a child alone and learned to step softly around the heavy things. "I told her I loved her but that I couldn't take sides.""You don't have to take sides, Mom.""I know I don't. I want to make sure you know that." A pause. "Are you all right?"He thought about how to answer that honestly."I'm different," he said. "Not broken. Just different."She w
Meridian Moves
The offices of Meridian Global occupied six floors of a black glass building in the financial district and were decorated in the particular style of places where enormous amounts of money are managed, which is to say expensively but without warmth, with art on the walls that had been chosen by a consultant rather than a person, and furniture that communicated authority without inviting comfort.Marcus Vane's office was on the top floor. It was large. It had a view that people paid to describe. He stood at the window now, his phone pressed to his ear, listening."The patent is clean," the voice on the phone said. "Cleaner than we hoped. The original attorney made one error in the claim specifications, a gap in claim six, but our contact at the patent office tells us that a supplementary amendment was filed this morning. First thing."Marcus said nothing."The amendment closes the gap. If it's approved, and it will be, the patent is effectively bulletproof.""Who filed the amendment?""
The Roadmap
Sable was already at the table when he arrived, and she already had documents in front of her.She looked up as he sat down. "You look like you slept.""I did.""Good. I didn't." She pushed one of the documents toward him. "This is the preliminary structure of what I'm calling Cross Energy Systems. Working name, you can change it. The capitalization table is on page three."He looked at the document. Clean, direct, formatted for a person who reads quickly. He scanned to page three. The numbers were as agreed. He folded the document and put it in his jacket pocket.She raised an eyebrow. "You're not going to read it?""I read at the kind of speed that would waste your time," he said. "I'll read it tonight. If anything is wrong I'll call you." He pulled out his own folded papers. "I have something to show you."He laid out the technical roadmap.She looked at it. Her eyes moved across the page quickly, then returned to certain points and slowed."You built this last night," she said."Y
What he left behind
Pete was locking up the garage when Ethan arrived.It was just after six. The evening light was orange and long, stretching the shadows of the buildings across the street into shapes that looked like something else. Pete looked up from the padlock, saw Ethan, and held the door open."Thought you'd be done with this place by now," Pete said."Not done," Ethan said. "Just saying something."They went inside. Pete switched on the overhead lights, the familiar fluorescent buzz filling the space. Ethan looked around at the garage the way you look at something you are about to stop seeing every day.He walked to his workstation. His tools were all in their places. He had always kept them that way, each tool in its specific position, not because anyone required it but because the kind of mind that works the way his did required a physical environment that matched its internal order. He looked at them."I'm going to need some time," he said. "I can't give you a specific date yet, but it will