After three Years in Prison, I Became a Billionaire

Chapter 5 :Fresh Meat

"I told you." Francis's voice stayed flat. "This morning. My mother."

Silence on the line. Then Chloe's tone shifted, softer, almost performing concern. "How is she? Is she alright?"

"You could have asked the hospital yourself." He watched the city slide past the window, gray buildings, gray sky, everything the same shade as the morning he'd walked out of prison. "Have you visited her once this year? Just once?"

Chloe didn't answer right away. When she did, her voice had gone thin. "I've been drowning in work, Francis. You don't understand what running a company is like."

He almost laughed. A year of silence, dressed up as a scheduling problem. Twelve months, and not one visit had fit into her calendar.

"Never mind," he said. "I'm coming home."

He hung up before she could arrange her excuse into something prettier.

For a moment he just sat there, phone loose in his hand, watching his own reflection ghost over the window glass. Three years he'd built a whole future around a woman who couldn't find an hour in twelve months to sit beside a dying woman's bed. He almost admired the discipline it took to avoid something that consistently.

"Naomi." He leaned forward. "Turn the car around. Take me to the apartment."

Naomi glanced at him in the mirror, said nothing, and turned the wheel. She didn't ask why. Francis suspected she already knew more about his life than he did at this point, and had the good sense not to mention it.

"For what it's worth," she said eventually, eyes back on the road, "Skyward doesn't make a habit of trusting men who fall apart easily. The board looked into you before I was ever sent to that curb, Mr. Cole. Your file made for interesting reading."

"Interesting how."

"Top of your class. Computer science. Then three years gone, and not one letter of complaint on record the entire time you were inside." She met his eyes briefly in the mirror. "Most men write letters. You didn't."

Francis looked back out the window. "Didn't have anyone worth writing to."

The building looked exactly as he remembered it. Marble lobby, private elevator, the kind of quiet that expensive places always had, the kind that made a man feel like an intruder even when he technically owned the key. He rode up alone, the key still in his pocket after three years, cold metal against his fingers, and let himself in without knocking.

The smell of food hit him first. Roasted something, wine breathing on the counter, low music playing from a speaker he didn't recognize. Laughter. Two voices, easy and familiar with each other in a way that made his stomach turn cold before his mind caught up.

Chloe and Andrews sat across from each other at the dining table, glasses raised halfway to a toast that never finished. Andrews's hand rested on the back of Chloe's chair like he owned it, like he'd been sitting in that exact spot for years and not months.

Both of them saw him at the same time. The laughter died fast, replaced with the particular silence of people caught mid-something.

Chloe recovered first. She set her glass down, smoothed her expression into something almost casual, though her fingers stayed a little too tight around the stem. "You're back? How's Mom doing?"

Francis didn't answer. He looked at Andrews instead, at the open bottle, the second plate, the ease of a man who had clearly eaten at this table before, more than once, more than a dozen times.

"Why is he here?"

Andrews set his fork down with a small, wounded sigh, the kind a man performs when he wants an audience to notice how gracious he's being. "Am I in the way? I can go." He rose halfway out of his seat, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin that probably cost more than Francis's prison-issued jacket. "It is your first night out, after all. I shouldn't intrude on you two."

"Sit down, Andrews." Chloe's voice snapped like a rubber band, then turned on Francis, sharper now. "And you. Three years in prison and you still haven't learned how to greet a guest. Andrews's staying over. His pipes burst. There's flooding all through his place."

Francis let that sit for a second, turning it over slowly in his head. A grown man, apparently wealthy enough to own half a company someday, chased out of his own house by a broken pipe and straight into someone else's marriage bed.

"There are hotels," he said quietly. "Good ones. Five-star, even. I hear they've mastered plumbing this century."

"He's not used to hotels." Chloe's chin lifted, daring him to push it further. "Not everyone wants to sleep somewhere unfamiliar, Francis, unlike you, apparently, who's spent the last three years perfectly comfortable in a cell."

It was a low blow, delivered with the casual cruelty of someone who'd practiced it in her head long before he ever walked through the door. Francis felt it land somewhere old and tender, and let it pass without flinching. He'd promised himself, back around month eighteen, that he'd stopped giving people that kind of satisfaction.

Andrews, sensing the tension thinning into something he could work with, leaned back in his chair with the relaxed air of a man watching a match he'd already bet on. "Chloe tells me prison changes a person. I always wondered how." His eyes swept over Francis, unhurried, cataloguing the thin jacket, the scraped knuckles, the frame three years lighter than it used to be. "Now I suppose I don't have to wonder."

"Careful," Francis said, mild as weather. "Keep talking like that and I might start wondering things about you too."

Andrews's smile didn't move, but something behind his eyes did. "Such as?"

"Such as why a man with his own company needs to borrow someone else's dinner table. His own wife's kitchen, even." Francis let the words sit a beat before adding, almost gently, "Or is that not yours to borrow either?"

For half a second, Andrews's composure slipped, just enough for Francis to see it. Then it was gone, folded neatly back under a practiced smile.

"Cute," Andrews said. "Prison really did sharpen your tongue."

"Prison sharpens a lot of things." Francis glanced at the empty chair beside him, the one that used to be his. "Mostly it teaches you to spot a parasite before it finishes feeding. Yours are usually smaller and slower than you, though. You're the first one I've seen wear cufflinks."

Andrews's smile thinned at the edges, though he covered it fast by reaching for the wine, pouring himself a glass he clearly didn't need.

"You always talk like this?" Andrews asked, aiming for casual and missing by a mile. "Or is it just for me?"

"Only for guests who eat off plates that aren't theirs." Francis folded his hands on the table, patient as a man waiting out a storm he knew would pass. "Most dogs at least have the decency to wait until the owner's out of the room."

"Francis." Chloe's voice had gone tight, a warning wrapped around his name. "You're being cruel."

"I'm being accurate." He said it without heat, the way a man states a fact about the weather. "There's a difference, though I understand the two can look alike from where you're sitting."

Chloe's eyes darted between them, the air in the room gone thick and unfamiliar. She looked between the wine, the second plate, the excuse worn thin as tissue paper, and Francis watched something in her face flicker, not quite guilt, not quite doubt, just a crack too small to matter.

"Sit," Chloe said finally, gesturing at the empty chair across from her, her voice trying and failing to sound like an invitation instead of a command. "You must be hungry. Three years of prison food, I imagine you've earned a real meal."

Francis looked at the roast, the wine, the candle burning low between two people who clearly hadn't been expecting a third guest tonight, let alone the one whose name was still on the lease.

"I'm not hungry," he said. "I ate on the way here. A payphone conversation and fifty dollars for a cab, if you're curious what the menu looked like." He let the words sit a moment, watching her face for a reaction that never fully arrived. "Efficient of you, sending cab fare to a man you hadn't seen in three years. Saved you the trouble of feeling guilty about it."

Something flickered across Chloe's face, gone before it could settle into anything real. "That was for your comfort. I didn't want you standing out there in the cold."

"No," Francis agreed. "You wanted to finish your client dinner without having to explain why you were leaving early. The cab fare was just the receipt."

Andrews let out a low whistle, clearly enjoying himself now that the target had shifted away from him. "He's not wrong, Chloe."

"Nobody asked you," Chloe snapped, then caught herself, smoothing her tone back into something more composed before turning to Francis again. "Fine. I was busy. I'm always busy. That's what happens when you build something from nothing while your husband—" she stopped short of finishing the sentence, but the shape of it hung there anyway.

"While my husband sat in a cell," Francis finished for her, voice even. "Go on. Say it. I've heard worse from people who owed me less."

A short laugh escaped him. Not loud. Almost fond, the way a man laughs at a joke he's heard too many times to be surprised by anymore.

"Right," he said, pulling out the chair across from them without being invited. "The pipes."