She Was Never Just the Billionaire’s Wife (Natasha and Chase) novel Chapter 45

Chapter 45 The Unraveling Son

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My step-father’s voice hasn’t changed in thirty years.

Low, measured, and precise, like a contract being read aloud

Every sentence placed with the deliberate care of a man who understands that words, deployed correctly, are more effective than any raised fist.

“Your mother hasn’t slept properly in two weeks,” Hendrik says, his back to the room.

“She cancelled her Thursday appointments with the therapist. She takes all her meals in the bedroom.”

I say nothing.

“The psychiatrist believes the two of you arguing again has set her back considerably.”

His eyes are sharp and colorless in the low light.

“I would like to understand why, after years of stability, we are back here again.”

The scotch in my glass is very good. I focus on that fact for a moment.

“It’s complicated,” I tell him.

“Simplify it.”

The old command.

I’ve heard it my entire adult life, leveled at boardrooms, at legal teams, at his own children whenever emotions threatened to make the air messy.

Simplify it.

Reduce the chaos to its component parts and deal with each one efficiently.

For the first time in my life, I don’t reach for the simplified version.

“I found out my sister is dead,” I say.

Hendrik’s expression doesn’t change.

“And you blame your mother.”

“She left Nat behind.”

The words come out harder than I intend them to.

“She packed us up in the night and she left a seven-year-old girl in an empty house and she never once looked back. So yes. When I found out Nat has been dead for five years, my first instinct was not to call my mother and offer her comfort.”

A long silence settles between us.

Hendrik smooths the front of his jacket with one hand, a gesture I’ve watched him make ten thousand times.

It means he’s recalibrating

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“You have always been the one I intended to hand the reins of the company to,” he says finally.

Ps voice carries no warmth.

“But a man who cannot manage his own family cannot manage an empire. I’ve said this to you before.”

“You have,” I agree.

“And yet here we are.”

Something shifts inside me. It happens quietly, like a cable that’s been under tension for years finally going slack.

I set my glass down on the window ledge.

“I need to tell you something honestly,” I say.

“And I need you to hear it as a man, not as a patriarch looking for a succession strategy.”

Hendrik says nothing. Which is as close to permission as he ever gives.

“I spent my entire childhood competing with Piper and Julian for your approval because it was the only way I knew to fill the hole that leaving Nat left behind.”

I keep my voice steady.

“Every deal I closed, every time I outperformed them, every time you nodded at me across a boardroom, I told myself it meant something. That I was building something worth sharing.”

I pause.

“I was building it for her. A version of it, anyway. Some story I told myself where I found her again and showed her

it hadn’t all been for nothing. That our mother left her, but I would take care of her now.”

The room behind us is a low hum of other people’s conversations.

“Now she’s gone,” I say.

“And I don’t want to keep doing this for the wrong reasons. I don’t want the company as a substitute for something I can’t get back.”

Hendrik stares at me for a long moment.

Whatever he’s feeling, his face doesn’t offer it up easily.

He’s not a man who was built for this kind of conversation and we both know it.

Before he can respond, Piper’s voice cuts across from nearby, sharp and carrying.

“The inability to separate personal grief from professional obligation.”

She stands with her arms folded, her expression set in familiar contempt.

“It must be inherited. You and Sonia both. All these intense feelings.

She tilts her head.

“You must get it from your mother.”

The temperature in the corner drops several degrees.

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Hendrik turns to face his daughter with the slow, deliberate movement of a man controlling a very precise anger.

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