Sweet Romance12 min read
I Really Am Worth Billions
ButterPicks13 views
My grandfather told stories about our money like they were family recipes: passed down, measured, never wasted. I grew up hearing about "five, then five hundred, then five hundred million" as if numbers were medals pinned to our lineage. I learned thrift the hard way—because my parents made me believe we were poor.
"My bank account is less than five thousand," my father used to say with a straight face.
"Give me all your red envelopes, Ashlynn. We'll survive," my mother would add.
"I'll hand it over," I would answer, folding the bills as if I were offering my future.
"I can't understand why you save so much," Laura said once, looking at me flinch at a price tag.
"It's safe," I said, counting coins in my head.
Then the truth dropped in my lap the week I left for university. My father, Garrett Barrett, cleared his throat at the airport, smiled the way big men smile when they are proud, and said, "We own dozens of apartments. This is yours." He handed me a key and a card. The number on the card made my eyes swim.
I rode into campus the first day in a car that smelled like new leather and embarrassment: a Porsche wrapped in a flea-market green cover my mother insisted would look "lucky." I parked on the wrong side of the gate because the guard wouldn't let me through; apparently "student" and "rich" didn't belong in the same phrase. I dragged two suitcases up five flights by myself. By the time I reached our room, everyone else had already enrolled themselves into the dorm's gossip ledger.
"Who's the girl from the green Porsche?" someone whispered.
"City pretty," another answered.
"She looks like she lost her keys and her pride."
I kept my head down. There was one roommate I noticed first—Elise Schneider. She wore the kind of smile that smelled like perfume and calculation. Her followers, Ainsley Day and Giovanna Neves, did what followers do: they laughed at the right moments, they applauded the precise pauses. I added them to the list in my head: people I would keep at arm's length.
Laura, my real friend, was different. "Eat with me," she said the first week, wiping sauce from her plate.
"You don't have to," I said.
"I like cheap food," she shrugged. "Company makes it cheaper."
"Company's nice," I admitted.
We lived on boxed lunches and borrowed lighters that never worked. I believed being thrifty was honorable until the university detected a new kind of scandal attached to my name.
"Someone posted that you're... not careful," my advisor snarled. "You know what 'not careful' means to people."
"It was my uncle," I blurted. "Vaughn Conti. He was showing me how to park. He is my—"
"You need to come to my office," she cut me off. "Now."
The footage was ugly: a sloppy photo of me at a hotpot with a man—my uncle—laughing, another of him bumping into a pillar as I gave directions. The internet does not have mercy. Someone had blurred a license plate, slapped a headline on it, and handed it to the school rumor mill. Boys from other majors texted me the worst of their curiosities. A professor suggested my scholarship might be in danger.
"I didn't do anything," I told Laura, who stood by me in that corridor like a lighthouse.
"You didn't," she said. "Let them try."
Then Elise—smile like a white bloom—smiled into a camera and posted. The next morning, a different post surfaced: me and a man in a parked car, looking close. The caption insinuated everything no one had the courage to say aloud.
"You need to be careful," Elise told me that night in the dorm. "People like stories. If you won't give them one, they will invent it."
"I have nothing to give," I said. "I kept coins my whole life. I don't know how to—"
"Act richer," she smiled. "It works for some people."
I wanted to be invisible. Instead the world gave me a spotlight and a rumor mill. My life turned into something I couldn't pay back.
One month later the campus buzzed again. A junior, a returnee who'd been in the States, stepped off a plane with more presence than passport stamps—Ryan Herrera. He moved through crowds the way the tide moves ships: inevitable. His brother, Aurelius Black, a face you saw on posters and billboards, might as well have been a sun that made the rest of us groan. Ryan looked at me once at a parents' dinner my family arranged—a dinner I thought was a friendly meet-and-greet—and said, "Your taste is oddly bold."
"I call it lucky," I said, because my mother had insisted on red.
"Bold then," he smiled and tried to hand me a napkin. His smile wasn't for show. It made me forget the rumors, just for a second.
"Are you okay?" Laura asked later that night.
"I'm tired," I said, but I had started to notice him. When he stood beside me, I felt smaller and safer at the same time.
School gave us a mid-autumn gala. Elise signed up for three slots—opening song, piano solo, and a closing dance—like a queen marking territory. I had zero talent, but the class vote landed me as host. "You should do it," Elise cooed, as if she were offering a favor.
"I don't know how to host," I told Laura.
"That's fine. Read the script. Smile," she nudged.
On stage the night of the gala, I was polished by borrowed gowns and loans of confidence. Ryan stood at my side, and when we announced each other we were the audience's glittering news. Elise's eyes were on us like a hawk. Later they would say I won the popularity vote by a hair. I didn't understand how that happened. The picture of Ryan helping me with my dress went viral—someone's camera and the right angle can make you into an image.
That one image became a campaign against Elise. She lost. She snapped—three cups shattered backstage—and I felt the thrill of winning. But winning brought its own cold.
Back in my dorm I found the bottle of my toner had been tampered with. "Someone is trying to ruin you," Laura said, furious. I turned on a recorder, bought a new bottle, and hid a second bottle marked with a sticker. When I played back the sound, Elise’s followers whispered and laughed as they poured something into the opened bottle.
"You're done," I said into the phone, dialing campus security.
The followers were punished immediately. Ainsley and Giovanna were expelled. Elise was careful. She had always been a step away from the dirt she pushed under the rug. When one of her lackeys screamed her name in a whispered confession, Elise pretended to be shocked.
"I never told them to do anything," she insisted.
"You're the leader," people said.
"I don't command anything."
"You told them to 'make it fun,'" the video showed.
Elise put on an innocent face and got away with a single reprimand at first. She had friends who could make a problem vanish. It was a lesson in how far you can go when you have friends who benefit from covering your tracks.
Ryan did something I never expected. He ignited an investigation. He tracked down the person who filmed the confession—someone from the news desk—and had the clip released publicly. The campus turned. People who had been laughing now watched in silence as the truth came out. The man who had egged the fire—our class leader—was called into the dean's office and left in disgrace.
"I told you he wouldn't let it go," Laura whispered with satisfaction.
"You did a lot," Ryan said quietly to me that night, handing me a steaming bowl of noodles in the student lounge.
"It was nothing," I said.
"It wasn't nothing. You let people push you. You didn't deserve any of it."
That was the first time Ryan said something pure and real to me. He stayed. He listened. He helped piece back the edges of my life.
Then life got complicated. Ryan's family was the sort of fold-out map of power where names like Aurelius Black and Clayton Curtis lived. A business dinner meant networking and smiles and a table where I sat next to Ryan like an awkward island. His mother, a gentle woman who adored me shamelessly, whispered, "You two should be close." His father, Clayton Curtis, floated ideas about "us" being "families."
I shouldn't have been surprised when rumours about a match started. I had never wanted to be anyone's project. But being seen by him felt nice enough to let it grow.
There was a woman named Ingrid Cash in Ryan’s office. kind, precise, and very professional. Her laugh was small and unthreatening. She brought contracts. She drank coffee from a pink thermos with a small bear sticker. I didn't mind. Ryan insisted there was nothing between them, and I wanted to believe him.
"She didn't mean anything," he said when I asked about the thermos.
"Then stop using her cups," I snapped, which was both petty and honest.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'll change it."
I believed him, but believing sometimes asked for more than trust. It wanted visible proof. He gave it—after a night of argument—when he removed the scent sachet from his car, the little rabbit charm of someone else's care, and looked at me like a man apologizing for not being brave enough to protect a love he seemed unsure how to keep.
The cracks were small at first—an ignored text, a shorter smile. Then we argued in the lobby of his office while people filed past. He said, "I can't fire her for being good at her job," and I said, "I don't want her fired; I want you to pick me when it matters." He couldn't, not then. Words were sharp and we both walked away with the wrong wounds.
After that, I did a thing people either call foolish or brave: I bought a stake in a company that mattered to Ryan's family. I reached out to Vaughn, my uncle, and to Foster Crawford, an old business friend who liked making things happen. I slowly bought stock until I had influence. It felt like armor.
When I walked into Clayton Curtis's office as a shareholder, I wasn't the same awkward girl from the green Porsche. I was a woman who could hold a signed paper and make decisions. People who had joked at my expense now adjusted their collars in my direction.
"You're the one who bought in?" Clayton asked, surprised.
"Yes," I said, meeting his eyes. "I care about where this family business goes."
The room filled with eyes. Ryan walked in and stopped like someone who's been asked a question he doesn't have a right answer to.
"What are you doing?" he asked me in a low voice.
"Protecting myself," I said. "Protecting what's mine."
When the board meeting turned to a topic I had prepared for—project allocations and ethical standards—I presented a dossier. Elise Schneider's name was in it. So were Ainsley and Giovanna and a host of other people who had benefited from a pattern of small cruelties. I had copies of messages, the audio of the toner tampering, the confession, and an invoice showing they'd tried to bribe someone to make a scandal stick.
"This is not about revenge," I began when I stood. "It's about accountability."
Elise sat in the corner like a statue. She tried a smile, a small one that didn't reach her eyes.
"Miss Schneider," I said, holding the microphone steady. "Would you like to explain how you thought poisoning a student's skincare would be acceptable in—"
"You can't say that," Elise snapped, rising. "You have no right!"
"I have a right. I have enough right to call this meeting public. Look around." I gestured at the assembled press, the board members, the family's lawyers, Ryan's parents, and our old classmates who had come out of curiosity. "Everyone who was affected is here."
For the first time Elise's face changed. Pride leaked out of her like air from a balloon.
"It's not true!" she echoed, then louder, "You planted those things! You bought your influence!"
"I bought influence because you made this happen," I said calmly. "You manipulated people who were vulnerable. You told them to act. You created a narrative and watched it spread."
"You think you can destroy me?" Elise's voice rose. Her color drained.
"I think the truth can," I said. "And it already has."
The crowd leaned in. Phones hovered like modern moths. Elise's followers were not present—Ainsley and Giovanna had long been expelled and had fled town. The live stream had already begun.
I slid the files across the table. "Transcript from private messages," I said. "Video of your followers admitting the plan. An invoice for the dye the toner bottle was contaminated with."
Elise's hands started to shake. First she smiled to cover it, then she wiped at her lip, then she looked for an ally and found empty air.
"You can't—" she breathed. "My family—"
The board members whispered. Clayton looked at me, then at his son. Suddenly the past months, the whispered slanders, the stolen nights, all that shadow work had a shape.
"This isn't simple," a board member said. He had half a mind to silence the whole thing. "We need legal counsel."
"Please," I said, "let the campus cases proceed. Let the law do what it must. But we are not naive. We saw a pattern of manipulation. We will not let it stand."
The press loved this. There was the climax journalists hunger for: a rich heiress exposing a campus queen. Cameras flashed like permission. People who used to avoid me were suddenly uncomfortable in their own ties.
Elise's expression moved through stages like a film reel. First denial—her lips formed the words, "You can't prove anything." Then anger—she lunged, voice shaking. Then bargaining—soft, pleading, "Please, you can't ruin my life." Then collapse—a covered sob that she attempted to smother.
"You told them to 'make it fun,'" I said, placing the recorded message on speaker. Her own voice filled the room, clipped and cruel.
"No!" she cried. "I—"
"You told them to swap my bottle," I said. "You told them to put my life on a public stage."
She covered her face with her hands as the press murmured and the board's face hardened. People around the table whispered, some cursed, some clapped silently. A woman in the back opened her arms wide like a conductor of justice, inviting the applause. The university's legal counsel stood and announced disciplinary action. The dean's face was a map of embarrassment and relief.
"Elise Schneider will be suspended pending the outcome of our investigation," the dean said firmly, the words echoing like a sentence.
"What about the expelled students?" a reporter called.
"They are out," the dean answered. "One will face criminal charges for harassment. Another will be reported to the authorities for attempted contamination."
Elise's breathing was ragged now. The layers peeled off. She was no longer the queen; she was a fraud revealed. Her hands trembled as she tried to compose herself for the cameras.
"Please," she begged, voice small. "Please, don't—"
The crowd reacted. Some people shouted for her to own it. Some whispered that she was finally getting what she deserved. Phones recorded. Faces were a blend of pity and schadenfreude. Ryan's eyes flicked to me; he looked both proud and guilty.
"You thought you could control everything," I said quietly, for him not for her. "But you couldn't control this moment."
She stood, then slumped. A security escort gently placed a hand on her elbow. The meeting's livestream had millions of hits by the time she was led out. People took selfies. The school announced a zero-tolerance policy. The message went viral: manipulation gets exposed.
Elise's public collapse was more than the legal consequences. Her social circle evaporated. People who had once bowed to her now kept their distance. On the day that the board made its public statement, a dozen friends who had smiled in her photographs now refused to be photographed with her. In the weeks that followed, the stories about her downfall were not about the dramatic shattering of cups but about how power lubricates cruelty—and how truth eventually erodes it.
I watched all of this with a tired heart. My satisfaction had cold edges. It wasn't a triumph like in stories. It felt like a long-awaited clearing. When the cameras turned away, I quietly texted Laura: "It’s over."
"Good," she replied. "Now let's eat."
There were other reckonings. The class leader who had planted the phone was expelled. The dean apologized publicly for not acting sooner. Ryan and I spoke then, more honestly than we had before.
"Why didn't you run when they started?" he asked.
"I didn't run," I said. "I learned to stand."
He took my hand. "I wish I had protected you more."
"You did what you could," I said. "Now let's do something bigger."
We rebuilt slowly. He taught me to trust in actions, not words. He would take an envelope and fix a problem without a drama. When he smiled, it wasn't for the cameras; it was private and it made my lungs loosen.
There was the other kind of change too. Foster Crawford kept his hand on me like a promise. He had been persistent in a way that felt like a warm blanket: protective, present, unglamorous in a way that was exactly what I needed. He took me to an unfinished ocean park one winter and showed me how he dreamed. He gave me hot porridge when I was sick. He brought me a bouquet of Austin roses—their petals reading "I will guard you." He proposed under fireworks and told me he preferred jumping to the end of things rather than building the story.
"I will protect what is yours," he said on one cold night. "You don't have to fight alone."
I said yes, because sometimes the safest place to live is with someone who insists on staying. He didn't want to be famous. He wanted to be reliable.
Ryan and I didn't end in a tragedy or a war. We became a different kind of lovers: two people who had once stumbled over miscommunications and then found a better rhythm. We stayed close, sometimes satellite close. He let me be powerful. I let him be gentle. We crossed lines carefully, with apologies and boxes of small proofs: a returned charm here, a changed thermos there.
When the ocean park opened the next spring it felt like a miracle. I walked its tunneled corridors of glass, the water above us, fish like blue coins sliding by. Foster stood next to me, his coat warm by my shoulder.
"This is ours," he said.
"It feels like it," I said.
Months later our wedding was a private thing, then a public one—our names printed on a small invite that Ryan politely accepted, making a joke about being the "best man, if allowed." He came with Aurelius and Clayton. People whispered. Some rolled their eyes. Some applauded.
When the dust settled, when the cameras and gossip moved on to new prey, I sat in my apartment one night and opened a drawer. I pulled out a small ring and set it on the table, the green car's fabric cover folded neatly at the end of my bed. A tiny rabbit sachet dangled from the mirror—the one Ryan had once put there and then removed, the one Foster had later replaced with something that smelled like home.
I smiled at the rabbit. I thought of the green Porsche and the night I first pulled it into the wrong side of the gate. I thought of the toner bottle, the cups, the triumphant shouts, and the silence after the falling. I thought of how I had learned to buy power, to earn the word "owner" of my own life.
I lifted the ring and slipped it on. It fit. The band warmed under my finger and I felt, oddly and finally, like I was exactly where I belonged.
The End
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