The Billionaire They Threw Away

Chapter 6: Flowers I Didn't Leave

I didn't tell Sophia where I was going. I told her I had a work thing, which wasn't technically a lie, just not the whole truth, the way most things I told her lately weren't.

The cemetery was quiet on a Tuesday afternoon. It usually was. I came here maybe once a month, sometimes less, and every time I told myself I'd stay longer than I actually did.

My father's headstone was simple. Daniel Cole. Two dates, thirty-four years apart. No epitaph, because my mother had died before she could choose one and I'd never trusted myself to pick the right words when I finally had to.

I stood there with Delgado's ledger folded in my jacket pocket, the paper worn soft now from being handled too many times in one day.

*R.C. knew. Confronted him. He did nothing.*

I kept coming back to that line, turning it over the way you turn over a stone looking for what's underneath. Richard Cole. My grandfather. The man who sent me birthday cards with fifty dollars folded inside every year until I turned eighteen, then stopped, like affection had an expiration date built into it. The man I'd seen maybe a dozen times in my life, always from a careful distance, always polite, always somehow unreachable.

I tried to remember any conversation between them that hadn't been strictly business. I couldn't find one. Every holiday call I remembered my father taking from Richard had ended within minutes, clipped, my father's voice going flat in a way it never did with anyone else. At the time I'd assumed it was just how men in that generation talked to their fathers … distant, dutiful, nothing more. I'd never once questioned it.

I'd never once suspected him of anything either. Why would I? He was a name on a company letterhead, a signature on a holiday card, someone my father mentioned rarely and never with warmth. I'd assumed the distance between them was just family drift, the kind that happens naturally when people build separate lives.

Now I wondered if the distance had been deliberate. If my father had kept his own father at arm's length because he knew something the rest of us didn't. Maybe those short phone calls hadn't been coldness at all. Maybe they'd been the sound of a man being careful about how much he said, and to whom.

"You should have told me," I said out loud, to a headstone that couldn't answer, the way I sometimes did when the silence in my apartment got too loud to sit with alone. "Whatever you knew. Whoever you were protecting. You should have told me before it got you killed."

The wind moved through the trees at the edge of the cemetery, indifferent, the way it always was here. I used to find that comforting, oddly. The idea that grief didn't change anything about the world, that the wind kept moving and the grass kept growing whether or not you were falling apart six feet above the person you'd lost.

Today it just felt lonely.

I crouched down and brushed a few stray leaves off the base of the headstone, the way I did every visit, more out of habit than necessity. That's when I noticed them.

Flowers. Fresh ones, white lilies, tucked against the base of the stone on the side I usually didn't clear because it faced away from the path. Not wilted. Not old. Placed there recently enough that the stems were still faintly damp.

I hadn't brought flowers today. I never did … my father hadn't been a flowers man, and it had always felt performative to leave them for someone who wouldn't have wanted the gesture. Sophia didn't know where the grave was; I'd never brought her here, some private reluctance I'd never examined closely enough to explain even to myself. My mother was gone. There was no one else who visited. There had never been anyone else who visited, not in twenty years, not once.

I picked up the lilies and turned them over in my hands, looking for a card, a note, anything. Nothing. Just the flowers themselves, tied with a plain ribbon, the kind you'd find at any grocery store in town.

My chest tightened in a way that had nothing to do with grief and everything to do with the growing, uncomfortable sense that I wasn't the only person paying attention to my father's death. Someone else had stood exactly where I was standing, recently, quietly, without leaving a name.

I thought about the texts. The stranger who seemed to know things before I did … about Ashcombe Trust, about Victor's five a.m. phone call, about a company insider I hadn't identified yet. Was it the same person? Someone who'd known my father well enough to grieve him, or someone using grief as a way to get close to me, to earn trust I hadn't offered yet? I turned the lilies over one more time, half expecting to find something I'd missed the first two times. There was nothing. Whoever had left them wanted to be seen doing it, or wanted me to notice they'd been here without ever having to explain why.

I pulled out my phone and typed without letting myself second-guess it.

*Did you leave flowers at my father's grave?*

I sent it before I could talk myself out of it, then stood there in the quiet cemetery, staring at the screen, waiting for the three dots to appear the way they always eventually did.

They didn't appear right away. A full minute passed. Then two. I almost put the phone away, convinced I'd get nothing back this time, that I'd finally asked the one question that would make whoever this was disappear entirely. I typed a second message anyway, unable to help myself.

*I'm not asking you to reveal yourself. I'm asking if my father meant something to you too.*

Then the reply came, short, and colder than anything they'd sent me so far.

*No. But someone did, and you need to find out who before they find you.*

I read it twice, then a third time, my eyes catching on the word *they.* Not him. Not Victor. *They.* Whoever was texting me had just told me, without meaning to or meaning to exactly, that this had never been about one man at all.