She is a quietly brilliant library assistant with a pocket of freelance earnings, a stack of unpublished essays, and a habit of writing letters to a friend in another country. He is Harbor City's most talked-about tech founder: brilliant, guarded, and impossible to ignore. One rainy morning she leaves a polite apology on the bumper of his expensive car. One staged confrontation at a restaurant turns into a real rescue in a late-night bar. Overnight their lives buckle into each other: job offers, family dinners at his grandparents’ house, and a reckless first night that neither of them fully planned. She keeps her head down; he keeps his secrets. The world applauds his trophies and suspects her motives. When the woman from his past returns—beautiful, famous, dangerous—she expects to reclaim him with money, history, and headlines. She finds something harder: a woman who refuses to be embarrassed into silence, and a CEO who will turn every attack into a public answer. This time the quiet girl won't be an accessory in someone else's life—she will be the consequence he never saw coming.
11 Chapters
