BILLIONAIRE RETURNS AFTER 18 YEARS TO SEE HIS EX WIFE… AND FREEZES AT WHAT HE SEES…

It was survival, arranged neatly enough to look like a choice.

“Mom?” a girl’s voice called from the back. “Who is it?”

A teenager appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a cloth. She was about sixteen, long-limbed and alert in a way that suggested she’d grown up practicing responsibility like a sport.

She looked at Marcus.

And Marcus’s vision tunneled.

Green eyes. His exact shade. The shape of her face, the tilt of her head, even the way suspicion sat naturally on her expression like a familiar coat.

It was like looking at himself, rewritten in a different handwriting.

Sarah said, “It’s a gentleman who wants to know about our area. Emily, go call your brother to greet our guest.”

Emily didn’t move immediately. Her eyes flicked to his watch, his shoes, the kind of silent inventory that measured whether someone was a threat.

“He’s probably drawing again,” Emily said. “He spends hours on those strange pictures.”

A moment later, a boy about ten came running in with sheets of paper covered in colored-pencil stains.

He stopped abruptly when he saw Marcus.

His eyes widened.

“Mom,” he said, voice thin with wonder. “He looks like the man in my drawings.”

Sarah laughed, a small, tired sound. “Daniel always draws a man in a suit. Says he dreams about him. Children have such imaginations.”

Daniel held the drawings up, turning them so Marcus could see.

Childish scribbles. But unmistakable: a tall man in a dark suit, standing beside a house. A man with green eyes that weren’t colored in, as if the boy hadn’t believed a pencil could capture them.

The suit was almost identical to the one Marcus had worn to the airport that morning.

His stomach dropped.

Sarah pointed to a wooden chair near the table. “Sit, please. Sorry for the simplicity.”

“Simplicity” wasn’t the word.

Marcus sat as if the chair might collapse under the weight of his guilt.

Sarah poured water into a cracked but clean glass and offered it carefully, guiding it by memory and instinct.

“Does your husband travel for work?” Marcus asked, forcing the question into the air like he could nail his shame to the wall and examine it from a distance.

Sarah’s mouth tightened, then softened again, like she’d practiced surviving this thought.

“He traveled,” she corrected. “It’s been eighteen years.”

Eighteen.

She said it like a fact and a wound.

“He said he’d come back rich,” she went on, voice turning into a quiet ache. “Give me the life I deserved. I was pregnant with Emily.”

Emily flinched. “Mom, you don’t have to tell that to strangers.”

“It’s all right,” Sarah said. “The gentleman seems trustworthy.”

Marcus’s throat felt lined with sand.

“So he never came back?” he asked, hating the performance, hating himself for being able to act at all.

Sarah sighed. “I never heard from him again. At first I thought he found another woman in the city. Then I thought something bad happened. But… deep down I always believed he’d return.”

Marcus’s fingers loosened.

The glass slipped.

Water spread across the table in a small, unimportant flood.

Sarah didn’t scold him. She just reached for a cloth with the calm of someone who’d cleaned up bigger messes.

“Marcus,” he whispered before he could stop himself.

Sarah paused, cloth in hand. “Marcus?”

Her smile returned, fragile and warm. “That was his name. Marcus Bennett. The most handsome man who ever existed.” Her gaze drifted slightly, not quite landing on his face. “He had green eyes like precious stones.”

Emily’s stare sharpened as if the words had snapped something into focus. She looked directly into Marcus’s eyes for the first time.

Her expression shifted from distrust to something closer to fear.

“Mom,” Emily said quickly, too quickly, “what time did Mr. Anthony say he would arrive?”

“What Mr. Anthony?” Sarah asked, confused.

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