Chapter 1 - The Press Wall
The flashbulbs hit my retinas like miniature lightning strikes, turning the quiet suburban snow into a blinding white fog. Seventeen black SUVs hadn't just parked on my street—they had colonized it. Mrs. Patterson across the street had practically fused her face to her living room blinds, and I half-expected a news helicopter to drop out of the gray sky above our magnolia tree.
"Claudia," Marcus Wellington said softly, his voice cutting through the mechanical whir of dozens of camera shutters rolling down from the front windows of his motorcade. "I didn't mean to turn your neighborhood into a war zone. But my security detail doesn't know how to do anything quietly."
I looked down at his feet. My waterproof, insulated winter boots—the ones I had unlaced in the freezing slush of Memorial Park just forty-eight hours ago—were laced tightly over Italian wool socks, polished to a dull matte sheen that made my heart ache with a strange, absurd pride.
"You're a billionaire," I whispered, the words tasting like dry cardboard. "A literal, Forbes-cover billionaire. And you were sitting in a public park barefoot in twenty-degree weather."
"I was testing a hypothesis," Marcus replied, stepping past the threshold into my hallway. The heavy oak front door clicked shut behind him, sealing out the cold and the gaping neighbors. "When you reach a certain level of wealth, Claudia, people stop looking at you. They look at your wallet, your title, your signature. After my wife passed away five years ago, the isolation became absolute. I needed to know if basic human empathy still existed in a world engineered to extract profit from every interaction."
"So you disguised yourself as a homeless man on Christmas Eve?"
"Not a homeless man. Just a man with nothing." He reached into the breast pocket of his charcoal bespoke suit and pulled out a small leather pouch. "And I found what I was looking for. But my sudden reappearance with a 17-car motorcade has created a secondary problem."
Before I could ask what kind of problem a man with a multi-billion-dollar industrial empire could possibly have, my cell phone buzzed violently on the entryway table.
It was Trent.
May you like
I hadn't spoken to him since he dropped his keys on the kitchen island and walked out into the snow with a twenty-eight-year-old girl named Chloe. I stared at the screen, watching his name flash against the dark glass, feeling the residual sting of a twenty-eight-year marriage discarded like a used tissue.
"Answer it," Marcus said, his blue eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that felt entirely too heavy for a Tuesday afternoon. "Let him hear who is standing in your hallway."
