Chapter 3 - The Coldest Winter
At 1:14 AM, Marcus walked into my penthouse study and dropped a thick manila folder onto the mahogany desk.
The apartment was pitch black, save for the single desk lamp and the glittering, uncaring lights of the Chicago skyline beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows. I hadn't moved from the leather chair. A glass of twenty-year-old scotch sat untouched beside me.
"You might not want to read all of it," Marcus said quietly, leaning against the edge of the desk.
"Give it to me."
My hands shook as I opened the folder. The first page was a medical summary from Cook County Hospital—a public, underfunded hospital on the rougher side of the city.
*Patient: Claire Moreau.*
*Admission Date: November 14th.*
*Delivery: Emergency Cesarean Section at 34 weeks due to severe preeclampsia and maternal exhaustion.*
*Infant A: Leonardo Moretti Moreau. Weight: 4 lbs, 2 oz.*
*Infant B: Maya Claire Moreau. Weight: 3 lbs, 14 oz.*
The breath hitched in my chest. *Preeclampsia. Maternal exhaustion.*
I turned the page.
Photographs. Documents. Bank statements.
After she returned the $150 million to my account, Claire had walked away with exactly twelve hundred dollars—the meager savings from an old account she had opened before we married. She hadn't gone to her estranged parents, who had criticized her for marrying me in the first place. She hadn't gone to our mutual friends, who had immediately closed ranks around me and Sophia.
She had rented a tiny, damp studio apartment above a bakery in a forgotten neighborhood.
During the first six months of her pregnancy, carrying twins, she had worked twelve-hour shifts at a wholesale nursery, lifting heavy sacks of soil, pruning roses until her fingers bled, just to earn fifteen dollars an hour under the table.
My stomach heaved with violent nausea.
While I was dining at Michelin-starred restaurants with Sophia, drinking five-thousand-dollar bottles of wine and discussing the acquisition of luxury resorts in the French Riviera, the mother of my children was eating canned soup and lifting soil sacks with a swollen belly.
I flipped another page, tears blinding me.
There was a billing notice. Cook County Hospital had placed her into collections for $42,000 in unpaid neonatal intensive care unit bills. Leo and Maya had spent six weeks in incubators, their tiny lungs struggling to breathe. Claire had spent every single night on a plastic chair beside them, pumping milk around the clock, refusing to leave their side even when her surgical incision became infected.
*She almost died.*
The medical notes explicitly stated it: *Patient experienced postpartum hemorrhage. Blood transfusion administered. Refused prolonged admission due to inability to afford inpatient bed charges.*
"Stop," I sobbed out loud, slamming the folder shut and burying my face in the papers. "Stop, please, God, stop..."
The pain was physical. It tore through my chest, burning, suffocating. I had done this to her. My pride, my paranoia, my unforgivable cruelty. I had cast her into the freezing dark, and she had bled on cold linoleum floors to bring my children into the world.
"She paid off the hospital last month," Marcus said, his voice entirely devoid of judgment, which only made the truth more agonizing. "It took her two and a half years. She took out a predatory micro-loan to buy that failing flower shop, worked twenty hours a day arranging bouquets for funerals, weddings, corner delis. She lives in a two-bedroom walk-up behind the train tracks. The roof leaks when it rains."
"She returned the money," I whispered, the words tearing my vocal cords. "She had a hundred and fifty million dollars. She could have lived like royalty. She could have bought the best private hospital in the world."
"She didn't want your blood on her hands," Marcus replied softly. "To Claire, accepting that money meant admitting that the seven years she loved you were an exchange of goods. She would rather have starved than let you buy the right to erase her."
I stood up, knocking the heavy leather chair back.
I walked to the vast glass wall overlooking the city. Somewhere out there, beneath the smog and the roar of the elevated train, in a tiny apartment with a leaking roof, my son and daughter were sleeping.
Claire was probably awake, her hands rough from thorns and cold water, worrying about the next rent payment or the cost of winter boots for the twins.
And I was sitting in an eighty-million-dollar glass cage, drowning in gold, utterly bankrupt in every way that truly mattered.
"Marcus," I said, my voice shaking with a terrifying, absolute resolve.
"Yes, Alexander?"
"The bank holding the loan on her flower shop. Who is it?"
"A local credit union. Apex Financial."
"Buy it."
"Alexander—"
"Buy the entire financial institution by sunrise," I commanded, turning toward him with tears tracking through the stubble on my cheeks. "Erase her mortgage. Erase the business loan. Anonymously. If she suspects it’s me, she’ll burn the building down. Do it through five different shell companies."
Marcus stared at me for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "And what about you?"
I looked down at my hands—the hands that had signed the divorce papers, the hands that had touched Sophia, the hands that had never once held my babies in an incubator.
May you like
"I am going to get my family back," I vowed in a broken whisper. "Even if I have to spend the rest of my life on my knees in the dirt to do it."
***