The Firefighter Became a Billionaire... and He’s Had Enough!

Chapter 002

The first thing Derek saw was the wine. Two glasses, deep red, catching the light on the coffee table.

The second thing he saw was Mike wearing Derek's pajamas, the grey ones with the frayed left cuff that Erin had always said she'd throw away but never did.

The third thing he saw was his wife.

Erin was standing in front of the stove, with a cheerful little apron covered in cartoon kittens tied around her waist. She looked comfortable. She looked *home*.

This was the same woman who had once written Derek a lengthy email, he still had it somewhere, explaining why she refused to participate in structures that reduced women to domestic servants.

Derek had read that email and agreed with her. So, he had taken over the cooking. And the cleaning. And the laundry. Every day. Every week. Without complaint. Because he loved her and he believed in her and he thought that was what it meant to be a partner.

Now he watched her stir the pan for Mike.

Erin turned at the crash.

She looked at Derek, who was bloodied, soot-streaked, and barely able to stand. But she did not look shocked.

She only sighed, like she had been interrupted by something tedious.

"Jesus, Derek."

"What were you doing at the hotel? Half-dressed." Derek stepped inside, letting the door close behind him. "With him. In a suite."

Mike straightened on the couch, opening his mouth. Erin silenced him with a look and turned back to Derek with the expression she reserved for particularly unreasonable members of the public at Q&A sessions.

"I’m not going to justify myself to you," she said. "Do you even hear how you sound right now? Interrogating me about where I was, what I was wearing, and who I was with? That is textbook possessive behavior." 

Her gaze sharpened. "You have an incredibly fragile male ego."

"I'm your husband."

"And I am not your property!" Her voice rose at once. "My body, my choices, and my relationships are not subject to your approval. I have spent my entire career fighting against exactly this kind of controlling—"

"Erin." He kept his voice level, as much as he can. "I pulled you out of a burning building tonight. I took a beam across my leg doing it, I was so injured. I just want to know what you were doing in that room."

Something flickered in her eyes. For just a moment. Then it was gone.

"You know what I noticed?" she said, pivoting cleanly. "You're not wearing the wristband."

Derek looked down at his bare wrist.

"I mean the awareness wristband for my foundation, the Firstlight Foundation for Firefighter Families,” Erin continued, her voice sharpening. “You’re a firefighter yourself, and you won’t even wear it? That shows just how little you care about firefighters’ families—and about me! So don’t you dare stand there and act like you have the moral high ground.”

Derek glanced at Mike. Mike wasn't wearing one either.

Noticing Derek’s gaze, Mike quietly reached into his pocket, took out a wristband, and slipped it onto his wrist.

Erin saw it and her expression softened immediately softened.

"Oh, don’t worry about that," she said warmly. "After everything you did to secure the Apex deal for me, you’ve already done more for firefighter families than most people will in a lifetime. Whether you wear the wristband hardly matters."

Derek looked at her. Really looked, the way you look at something when you're finally ready to see it clearly. The hypocrisy at the blatant double standards and the theatrical acts made his gaze narrow and his expression darkened. 

"So if *he* does it, it's nothing," Derek said. "But when I do the same thing, I'm the worst man alive."

"It's about pattern and intention—"

"Tell me the truth, Erin."

The words landed softly. She stilled.

"Just tell me the truth," he said again. "Do you really love me?"

The silence stretched.

And then, with the cool precision of someone who had simply decided the performance was no longer necessary, Erin set down her spoon.

"Of course," she said. "Our love works, doesn't it?"

"You’re a frontline firefighter," she continued. "I’m the founder of the Firefighter Family Safety Foundation. What could possibly be a better love?"

Her tone suggested the answer should have been obvious.

"My image has never been stronger than it has been with you beside me. You made me believable. You made me real to people."

"That's your definition of love?" For a moment, Derek cannot believe what he heard.

“For God’s sake, grow up!” Erin snapped, as though she were scolding a child. “Isn’t that why you left finance to become a firefighter in the first place? You gave me credibility, and I gave you a life you could never have afforded on your own. That’s what this marriage has always been…”

A fair exchange."

The words burned away the last illusion Derek had been clinging to.

Not love. Not marriage. An exchange.

For the first time, he saw exactly what he had always been to her.

Three years of cooking her meals, washing her clothes, standing beside her at events, and rearranging his life around hers. Three years of believing that every compromise brought them closer.

None of it had meant anything. Because this is just part of a fair exchange.

But she had not always been like this. He remembered the girl he had met at university. Back then, she had simply been Erin.

The girl who waited outside the training center with a cheap umbrella because she knew he had forgotten his. 

The girl who carried protest signs in the rain and still stopped to help an injured pigeon on the pavement. 

The girl who once spent her last twenty dollars buying him a secondhand fire-service manual because she had seen him staring at it through a bookstore window.

She had been so young then. So hungry and so afraid and so real.

But now, He looked at the woman in front of him now and realized he didn't know when she had stopped being that girl.

To this new lady boss, Derek was merely a marital prop to serve her foundation's narrative and her public persona.

Something inside him finally let go.

"I want a divorce," he said calmly.