The Ultimate Billionaire Romance Bundle

When you're standing backstage holding a painting you made when you were six, you start to realize that losing someone doesn't happen all at once—it happens in layers.

First, you lose the person.

Then you lose the only things that prove they existed.

My mother's been sick for months. The kind of sick that turns your kitchen counter into a pharmacy and your living room into a waiting room for news that never gets better.

The bills came first in envelopes.

Then in phone calls.

Then in letters with words like final notice and collections printed in red like warnings I couldn't outrun.

I sold almost everything.

Picked up a second shift.

Called every number I could find.

It wasn't enough.

So now I'm here—backstage at an auction house that smells like wood polish and old money.

Holding paintings wrapped in brown paper that I haven't looked at in years.

Because looking at them means remembering him.

Nine years ago, I let go of the only man who ever made silence feel safe.

He had a dream—big, sharp, the kind that doesn't leave room for a girlfriend drowning in hospital bills and fear.

So I told him I didn't love him anymore.

I said it standing in his kitchen, my hands steady, my voice flat, while everything inside me split clean down the center.

He believed me.

And I let him.

The auctioneer called my lot number and I stepped out under lights that felt too bright, too warm, like they were trying to expose something I wasn't ready to show.

The paintings were lined up behind me on easels—nine of them, small and uneven.

The kind of art that only means something to the people who made it.

I couldn't look at it.

The auctioneer started the bidding and I stood there, fingers laced together so tight my knuckles ached, scanning the room for a single raised hand.

Nothing.

Rows of faces, polished and distant, looking at my childhood like it was clutter at a yard sale.

The auctioneer dropped the price.

Then dropped it again.

Still nothing.

My throat closed around something I refused to call a sob. I swallowed it down, smiled the kind of smile that's just teeth and survival, and leaned into the microphone.

"Thank you for your time," I said, already stepping back, already doing the math—how many shifts, how many months, how far behind we'd fall.

Then a hand went up in the back of the room.

And a deep voice I hadn't heard in nine years cut through the silence like a blade wrapped in velvet.

"Two million," he said. "For all of them."

My knees locked. My fingers found the edge of the podium and held on like it was the only thing keeping me upright.

I knew the voice before I found his face.

But my eyes searched anyway—past shoulders and turned heads—until they landed on him, standing in the last row like he'd been trying not to be seen.

And for the first time in nine years, I wasn't losing him in layers.

He was walking toward me like he'd never left.