CHAPTER 2 — THE LETTER HER MOTHER LEFT BEHIND
The ballroom remained frozen.
No one spoke.
No one even dared to breathe too loudly.
The billionaire, Richard Harrington, stared at the young waitress as though the ground beneath him had disappeared.
The old photograph trembled in his hands.
The girl's eyes.
The shape of her smile.
Even the way she tilted her head.
It all felt painfully familiar.
"What is your name?" he finally asked.
The young woman swallowed.
"Emma."
The name hit him harder than he expected.
Because twenty-three years earlier, there had been another Emma.
Emma Collins.
The woman he had loved before wealth, before power, before the empire.
The woman he had believed had abandoned him.
Tears rolled down the waitress's cheeks as she slowly removed a folded envelope from her purse.
"My mother told me to give you this if I ever found you."
Richard's hands shook as he opened it.
Inside was a letter written in fading ink.
Dear Richard,
If you are reading this, I am gone.
I never stopped loving you.
I never left because I wanted to.
Someone paid me to disappear.
Someone threatened our daughter.
I thought I was protecting her.
But she deserved to know who her father was.
Please don't let her spend the rest of her life believing she was unwanted.
Love always,
Emma.
Richard's knees nearly gave out.
Across the ballroom, his wife suddenly turned pale.
May you like
Because she recognized the handwriting.
And she knew exactly who had paid Emma to disappear.
