His Broke Ex-Wife Has a Billionaire Best Friend

My fingers were already moving before I could think.

I screenshotted the text, then typed back: *Who is this?*

The reply came before I could even set my phone down.

*Someone who got burned too.*

I stared at those five words for a long moment. The parking lot hummed around me—a car backing out, a shopping cart rattling across asphalt, the distant wail of a siren somewhere on Lamar. Normal sounds from a world that had stopped making sense in the last forty minutes.

I typed: *What do you want?*

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Then a Dropbox link dropped into the conversation, followed by a single line: *Look at the Series B investor list. Page four.*

No name. No explanation. Just the link, sitting there like a grenade with the pin already pulled.

I opened it.

The files loaded slowly on my phone—partial screenshots of what looked like legal documents, the kind of dense financial paperwork I'd learned to tune out at Ryker's dinner parties when the men would drift into one corner and talk about capital and multiples and runway. I'd always smiled and refreshed my wine and found someone else to talk to.

I should have paid attention.

Page four. I scrolled until I found it.

Orion Partners. Lead investor. Series B round. Eight million dollars.

VP of Acquisitions: Jade Moreau.

I read the name twice. Then a third time.

Jade Moreau. Not Williams—Moreau. The Instagram bio had said Williams, which meant she'd either changed it or was using a different name online. And she wasn't a marketing coordinator. She was a VP at the firm that had written Caldera Ventures its biggest check.

I pulled up my phone's calendar and scrolled back eighteen months. Ryker's first business trip to San Francisco. The weekend he'd come home distracted, checking his phone at dinner, laughing at texts he'd angle away from me. I'd asked him about it once and he'd said it was a potential investor, that he couldn't talk about it yet, that I needed to trust him.

I had.

The timeline was perfect. Jade hadn't stumbled into our marriage—she'd walked in through the front door with eight million dollars and a term sheet, and Ryker had handed her the keys.

I sat with that knowledge for exactly thirty seconds before I put the car in drive.

I needed my things. More than anything, I needed the fireproof box in the back of the bedroom closet—my father's documents, his handwritten notes, the only copies of things that couldn't be replaced. Everything else could be bought again someday. Those couldn't.

The drive to the apartment took twelve minutes. I spent them rehearsing what I'd say to Ryker, cycling through versions that ranged from controlled to catastrophic. By the time I pulled into the garage, I'd settled on calm. Measured. I would be a person who had her emotions under control.

Then I put my key in the lock and it didn't turn.

I tried again. And again. The key slid in perfectly but the mechanism wouldn't catch—the subtle wrongness of a changed lock, a door that no longer recognized me.

I pressed the buzzer.

The door opened almost immediately, like she'd been expecting me.

Jade Moreau was smaller than I'd imagined from her videos. Delicate-looking, with dark hair loose around her shoulders and a silk robe the color of old champagne. She was holding a coffee mug—my mug, the hand-thrown ceramic one I'd bought at a craft fair in Marfa two years ago, the one with the slightly uneven handle that I loved precisely because of its imperfection.

She looked at me with an expression of practiced sympathy. The kind that had been rehearsed.

"Ivy," she said. "Ryker said you might come by."

My mouth went dry.

"I need my things," I said. "My personal documents. The box in the—"

"Your things are right here." She stepped back slightly and gestured toward the hallway behind her.

Three black garbage bags. Hefty brand, the kind with the red drawstring. Sitting in a neat row against the wall like they'd been waiting there for hours. Maybe they had.

Something in my chest cracked open.

I could see the corner of my Valentino coat poking out of the first bag, the camel-colored wool crushed against a knot of black plastic. My mother's jewelry box—the lacquered one with the ballet dancer on top—was visible through the thin wall of the second bag, tilted sideways.

"The box from the closet," I said, my voice coming out steadier than I felt. "The fireproof one. My father's documents are in there."

Jade tilted her head slightly. "Oh, that one. Ryker said the contents are company property. He can't release those."

"They are not company property. They are my father's personal—"

"You'd have to take that up with Ryker's legal team." She smiled, and the smile was almost kind, which was somehow worse than cruelty would have been. "I'm sorry. I really am."

Then she stepped back and closed the door.

The click of the latch was very quiet. Very final.

I stood in the hallway for a moment, staring at the door, before I made myself move. I crouched down and started going through the bags, my knees on the hard floor, my hands shaking as I catalogued what remained of my life. The Valentino coat. My Kindle, cracked at the corner. A tangle of phone chargers. My college diploma, rolled up without a tube, already starting to curl.

The door across the hall opened two inches. I felt the neighbor's eyes before I saw them.

My face went hot.

I kept moving. Kept checking. Clothes, toiletries, a few books. Then I opened the jewelry box.

The necklace was gone.

A thin gold chain with a small compass charm—my mother had worn it every day for the last decade of her life. She'd pressed it into my hand at the hospital, three days before she died, and told me to always know which direction I was heading.

I stood up so fast the blood rushed from my head.

I knocked. Hard. Three times.

Jade opened the door again, her expression unchanged.

"There's a necklace missing from the jewelry box," I said. "Gold chain, compass pendant. It was my mother's."

She blinked slowly. "I don't know anything about a necklace."

"It was in that box. It's always in that box."

"You're welcome to ask Ryker about it." A small pause. "Is there anything else?"

I had nothing. No legal standing, no leverage, no proof. Just my word against the silence of a closed door.

Jade stepped back and the door swung shut for the second time.

I gathered the bags. All three of them, the plastic handles cutting into my palms as I dragged them toward the elevator. The neighbor's door was fully closed now. The hallway was empty and bright and humming with the particular indifference of expensive buildings.

My phone buzzed as the elevator descended.

A voice message from Ryker. Twelve seconds long.

*Don't come back to the apartment again, Ivy. Next time I'll have security handle it.*

The lobby doors opened onto the street and the March air hit me—cool and carrying the faint smell of cedar, the way Austin always smelled in early spring. I dragged the bags to the front steps and sat down on the concrete edge, the garbage bags arranged around me like some kind of terrible still life.

No cards. No house. Twenty-two hours left on the car.

I opened my phone because I didn't know what else to do, and I did what people do when they've run out of options: I scrolled through my contacts looking for someone who could help. My college roommate was in Portland. My cousin hadn't spoken to me since the wedding. Sierra would come, but Sierra had a newborn and a husband who already thought I was a bad influence.

I kept scrolling until I hit the bottom of the list.

A single sunflower emoji. No name. A number I hadn't dialed in ten years.

I stared at it. My thumb hovered.

Then my screen lit up with a notification—a Threads message, from that exact number, sent seven minutes ago.

*Just landed in Austin. You still at the old place?*

I read it twice.

Caspian.

Of all the nights. Of all the impossible, terrible, perfectly timed nights—Caspian Cole had landed in Austin seven minutes ago and was looking for me.

I sat on the steps with three garbage bags and a broken jewelry box and my dead mother's missing necklace, and I looked at his message until the words blurred.

Then I started typing.