Rise Of The Belittled Billionaire.

Chapter 6

Jade made a face and turned her head slightly to the side.

“Ethan.” Mia's voice was the flattest of all of them. She looked at him from the top of the steps with her arms folded and her expression somewhere between bored and irritated, like she was running fifteen minutes behind on her morning and he was the reason. “You need to take that around to the back, and keep it at the trash area. I don't want it near the front entrance.”

He looked at her.

“And then,” she continued, “you are going to come inside, and you are going to explain to me and this family where you have been and why you thought it was acceptable to disappear for an entire night without a single word to anyone, and who was going  to do your house Jobs, my feet your always massage every night. And your explanation needs to be good, Ethan. It needs to be very good. Because right now, the generosity of this family is wearing extremely thin, and any improper explanation will result in you getting your ass kicked out completely.”

“Generosity,” he said.

“Yes. Generosity.” Karen stepped back into it, her voice picking up volume. 

“Do you have any idea what it has cost this family to keep you and your late mother here? Four years. Four years of a roof over your head, food on your table, a position at Sutton Cosmetics that you did nothing to earn and have done nothing impressive with since the day you got it. Four years of this family carrying you and your late mother, and this is the respect you show us?”

Derek laughed once, short and sharp. 

“Carrying is right. Man doesn't bring a single thing to this table. Not money, not connections, not even a presentable appearance half the time.”

“You were supposed to be here last night,” Jade added, glancing at Mia before looking back at him. “Director Sutton had an event. A significant event. The kind of event that required a husband present, for appearances, and you were nowhere. Do you know how that looked? Do you even care even though I wasn't going to allow you come along in the first place, you're only going to embarrass me that is what you are good at.”

“His mother was dying,” Karen said, waving a hand dismissively. 

“We know, we know. That doesn't excuse a grown man from his responsibilities. Plenty of people deal with sick relatives and still manage to function like adults, just because his mother was sick just life just stopped, well I'm sure he must have eaten something this morning.”

Ethan's grip on the urn tightened slightly.

“She cleared your skin,” he said.

Karen blinked. “What?”

“Your skin.” His voice was even. “Four years ago. You remember what it looked like. You remember those dark patches that started on your neck and spread. You remember what the doctors told you that it was progressing, that it was eating through the layers, that in another year you wouldn't be able to cover it anymore.” 

He looked directly at her. 

“You remember sitting in my mother's back room for three hours while she worked on you and didn't charge you a single cent. You remember that your skin cleared in six weeks when nothing else had touched it in two years.”

Karen's face went very still.

“And you, Derek.” Ethan didn't raise his voice. 

“You remember the debt. The collectors who showed up here twice. The number that had gotten so large that you were talking about selling this house. You remember the family ring  the one that's been in the Sutton family for three generations  being sold to cover what you owed because my mother sold her own belongings first and it still wasn't enough, so she sold that too. You remember all of that.”

Derek's jaw moved but nothing came out.

“And Mia.” He turned to her last. “You remember when Sutton Cosmetics had nothing. When the formulas weren't working, when the production line was failing, when every product you put out was getting pulled or returned or ignored. You remember my mother sitting with your team for weeks. Giving them everything. Every compound, every formula she had spent years developing, every process she had figured out through trial and error so that you didn't have to. You remember how fast things turned around after that.” He paused. 

“You built this company on her work. And last night she died asking if you were coming.”

The front of the house was quiet.

Then Karen straightened up and her expression reset itself into something cold and composed. 

“Are you finished?”

“Because I want to make something clear to you.” She came down one step, her robe settling around her. “Everything your mother did, she did willingly. Nobody put a gun to her head. Nobody forced her to do a single thing. She made choices, and we are grateful for those choices, but gratitude does not mean we owe you a debt for the rest of our lives.”

Then she paused and uttered.

“Guys did we forced her?”

Immediately the she shook their head.

“And let's be honest,” Derek said, recovering now, his voice finding its footing again. 

“What is an idea without capital? What does a formula do sitting in some woman's notebook in a back-room clinic? It does nothing. It goes nowhere. It helps nobody." He spread his hands. 

“This family took those ideas and turned them into something real. We provided the money. The infrastructure. The industry contacts, the marketing, the legal framework, the experts who actually knew how to scale a product and bring it to market. Your mother had a little knowledge. We had everything else. So don't stand there acting like she built this company. She contributed a piece. We built the rest.”

“A very small piece, honestly,” Jade said quietly, and the corner of her mouth moved.

“You lived under our roof,” Karen said. 

“You ate our food. You collected a salary from our company. And now you're standing at our front door holding a jar of ashes and looking at us like we owe you something?” She shook her head. 

“Ethan, I have tried to be patient with you. I have tried to be understanding. But there is a limit, and you are standing well past it. You will take that —” She gestured at the urn. “— around to the back. You will not bring it through the front door. And until you learn to behave like a man who understands his position in this house, you will be staying in the guest room above the garage.”

“We were going to say the garden shed,” Derek said pleasantly, “but Mia said that was too far.”

“You should be grateful,” Jade said.