His Broke Ex-Wife Has a Billionaire Best Friend

My thumb was still hovering over the screen when headlights swept across the front of the building.

A black Porsche Taycan rolled to a stop at the curb. Quiet engine. No drama. Just the soft crunch of tires on concrete and then the driver's door opening, and then him.

Caspian Wren was taller than I remembered. That was the first thing my brain registered, which said something about the state I was in—that I was cataloguing physical details instead of processing the fact that he was actually here, standing on the sidewalk in front of my old building at nine o'clock on a Tuesday night, wearing a black coat that fit like it had been made specifically for his shoulders.

He looked the same. He looked completely different. The boy who used to sit behind me in AP History had grown into someone with a jaw like carved stone and eyes that swept the scene in front of him with a kind of quiet, unhurried assessment.

Those eyes found me.

Then they found the garbage bags.

I watched something move across his face. Not surprise—more like confirmation of something he'd already suspected. His chin dipped slightly. The warmth that had flickered in his expression when he first saw me shifted into something else. Something that made me want to look away.

He crossed the sidewalk without saying a word and stopped in front of me.

"These are your things?"

Three words. No preamble, no *what happened*, no *are you okay*. Just the question, delivered in a voice that was lower than I remembered, with an edge underneath it that had nothing to do with me.

"Most of them," I said.

He nodded once. Then he reached down and picked up two of the bags like they weighed nothing, carrying them toward the car. He came back for the third. He didn't ask me to help. He didn't say anything at all, just moved with this quiet, deliberate efficiency, like he was handling something that needed to be handled carefully.

I stood up. My legs felt unsteady.

He opened the trunk, settled the bags inside with more care than their contents probably deserved, and then he was standing beside me, close enough that I caught his smell—not the laundry detergent and cheap body wash of high school, but something else entirely. Leather and cedar and something warmer underneath, something that probably had a French name and cost more than my first car.

He shrugged off his coat and held it out.

I stared at it.

"You're shivering," he said.

I hadn't noticed. I took the coat. It was still warm from him, and when I pulled it around my shoulders, the smell intensified, and my fingers curled into the lapels without my permission. Something in my chest pulled tight.

Caspian looked at me for one long moment. Then he said, "Come on," and walked to the passenger side and opened the door.

No questions. No performance of concern. Just: *come on.*

I got in the car.

---

He had a serviced apartment on South Congress—not a hotel, but a proper space with a kitchen and bookshelves and a desk that had clearly been used. A company apartment, I realized. Long-term. He hadn't come to Austin on a whim.

On the drive over, I talked. I don't know why—maybe because the car was dark and he wasn't looking at me, just watching the road, and it felt easier to say things into that particular kind of quiet. I told him about the pharmacy. The cards. The text from the unknown number. Jade's face in the doorway, that practiced sympathy, the three bags already waiting in the hall like I'd been expected.

I told him about my mother's necklace.

Caspian didn't say anything. But twice—when I said Ryker's name, and again when I described the locked door—I saw his hands shift on the steering wheel. His knuckles went pale for just a second before he relaxed them again.

He was angry. He was being very careful about not showing it.

In the apartment, he poured me a glass of water and set it on the coffee table in front of me. Then he opened his laptop.

"Three minutes," he said. "Give me three minutes."

I watched him pull up Caldera Ventures' public financial filings. He moved through the documents fast, with the ease of someone who knew exactly what he was looking for. I wrapped my hands around the water glass and tried to remember how to breathe normally.

He stopped scrolling.

"Come here."

I leaned over and looked at the screen.

"Your father's fifty thousand," Caspian said. "You said Ryker called it a wedding gift."

"He did. He said my dad's transfer note—"

"I pulled your father's email archive. The 2018 backup, before his server went offline." He pointed at the screen. "He sent Ryker a term sheet the same day as the transfer. Five percent equity in exchange for the capital. Ryker countersigned."

The room went very still.

"Ryker signed it," I said.

"And then your father died, and Ryker deleted the document from Caldera's system." Caspian's voice was completely level. That steadiness was somehow the most frightening thing in the room. "The company is currently valued at a hundred and twenty million dollars, Ivy. Five percent is six million dollars. He walked you out of that apartment with three garbage bags and kept six million dollars that belongs to your family."

Six million dollars.

I set the water glass down because my hands had started shaking again and I didn't want to drop it. The number didn't feel real. It sat in my head like a stone dropped into deep water—I could track its descent, but I couldn't feel the bottom.

"How do I get it back," I said. It wasn't really a question. It was something closer to a demand, aimed at the universe in general.

Caspian closed the laptop.

"Not through normal channels," he said. "The term sheet's gone. The email server is gone. Ryker's lawyers have had three years to make sure there's nothing left to find." He paused. "Unless the original was printed."

I looked up.

"Your father," he said. "Did he keep paper copies of important documents?"

The fireproof box.

The one Jade had told me was *company property*. The one she'd refused to let me take. I'd been so focused on the necklace, on the immediate loss, that I hadn't stopped to think about what else might be in there.

My father had been meticulous. He'd kept paper copies of everything—tax returns, contracts, correspondence. He'd grown up in a family that had lost important documents once and never recovered from it. It had made him almost compulsive about backup copies.

"Yes," I said. "He kept everything."

Caspian stood up. He picked his car keys up off the table.

"The box is still in the apartment?"

"Jade said it was company property. She wouldn't let me—"

"Do you know the combination?"

"My mother's birthday."

Something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile—more like a door opening a crack, letting out a sliver of light.

"Ryker has an IPO celebration tomorrow night," he said. "I saw it on the Caldera investor calendar. Whole building will be at the venue by eight." He was looking at me with that same quiet calculation I'd noticed in the car—measuring something, weighing it. "You need a plus-one?"

And there it was. The corner of his mouth. Just barely.

I knew that expression. I'd seen it once before, when we were fourteen and he'd appeared at my locker the morning after Marcus Hale had made my life hell for a week, and told me with that exact same almost-smile that Marcus would find his bicycle locks unusable for the foreseeable future.

He'd been right.

"You're serious," I said.

"The box is in the apartment. The apartment will be empty. You know the combination." He tilted his head slightly. "What part of this is unclear?"

I looked at him—this man I hadn't spoken to in ten years, who had appeared out of nowhere and put my garbage bags in his trunk like they were something worth protecting, who had found in three minutes what I hadn't known to look for in three years.

"Okay," I said.

The word came out steadier than I felt.

He nodded once, like it was settled, and reached for his phone. "I'll have something appropriate sent over for you tomorrow. We'll leave at seven-thirty."

Outside, the Austin night pressed against the windows, cedar-scented and indifferent. Somewhere across town, Ryker was probably raising a glass in my kitchen, in my apartment, with a woman who was wearing my apron and keeping my mother's necklace.

I thought about the fireproof box. My father's careful handwriting on a term sheet that was supposed to have disappeared.

Tomorrow night, we were going back.