Chapter 6
The silence from their last conversation had stretched into a full day. Alexander had left for work before she woke up and returned long after she'd gone to bed. The apartment felt vast and empty again, a gilded cage she was left to wander.
The next morning, the silence was broken by the arrival of a woman named Helen, a personal assistant who looked even more efficient than the lawyer. Helen gave Lily a new school uniform, a timetable, and a driver's schedule. The uniform was made of crisp, expensive wool that felt strange against her skin. The uniform she had been wearing was old, but it was hers.
The school, a prestigious prep academy in a quiet, affluent suburb, was a world away from her old public school. Lily felt the stares the moment she stepped out of the black sedan. The students were a sea of designer backpacks and perfectly styled hair. She was an outsider, a charity case in a sea of privilege.
Her first class, a history seminar, was a blur. She couldn't focus. All she could think about was the cold, hard anger in Alexander's eyes when he'd seen the sketchbook. The glimpse into his past had been a moment of connection, a thread of humanity, but he had quickly and violently severed it.
At lunch, she found herself sitting alone at a table, nursing a bottle of water. That's when a girl with a sharp bob and an even sharper tongue approached her. "You're the new girl, right? The one Alexander Cross took in?"
Lily nodded, her stomach clenching. She knew who Alexander Cross was, of course. His name was on the building that housed her school, in the form of a new sports complex that he had recently funded.
"My father is on the board of his company," the girl said, her voice dripping with an almost rehearsed kindness that didn't reach her eyes. "He said you were... an obligation. It must be so hard to lose your family and have to rely on a man you don't even know." The girl's name, Chloe, was a whisper on the wind of gossip.
The words were meant to sound sympathetic, but they were a knife. Lily was a topic of conversation, a pity project. She was not a person, but an "obligation."
The day dragged on, and by the time the driver picked her up, she was exhausted. The penthouse was quiet when she got back. She walked into the kitchen to grab a glass of water, and that's when she heard it.
A voice, low and strained, came from the hallway that led to his office. "The numbers don't lie. I don't care what he promised you. I will not greenlight a project that has a twenty percent chance of failure. We will not be investing in this project. The deal is dead."
It was Alexander. He sounded like a different person. Gone was the controlled, detached CEO from their dinner. This was a man under pressure, his voice tight with stress and frustration. Lily stood frozen, listening.
"No," he said, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "I am not like my father. I will not put my company at risk for a ghost. The past is the past."
A cold shudder ran through Lily. He was talking about the same debt of honor he'd mentioned to her, the promise to his father. But he was refusing to pay it. The boy who had drawn families and houses had disappeared, replaced by a man who was willing to let go of the past in a way Lily couldn't comprehend. The man who had been her grandfather's friend, the man who had helped his father, was now just a ghost to be dismissed.
She walked away quietly, her heart pounding. The deal he'd made with her was an exception, a final act of respect. But in his world, a deal was just a transaction, and the past was a ghost he was determined to bury.