The Billionaire's Dead Wife

Chapter Three – The Photograph

Roman stared at the ceiling of his penthouse while the clock on his nightstand turned 3:17 to 3:18. The city lights cut across his floor in thin strips, and his hands were clasped behind his head like he could hold his thoughts still. He could not.

Maya Carter’s face kept sliding over Isabella’s. The gala played in pieces behind his eyes. The glass breaking. The way Maya had tucked her hair behind her ear before she lifted her camera. The sharp edge in her voice when she said I wasn’t raised in a barn.

It was the same cadence. The same lift at the end of the sentence.

He threw the covers off and crossed to the bar. He poured two fingers of scotch and did not drink it. What unsettled him as much as Maya’s resemblance was his mother. Vivian had walked out of the gala without a word to him. She had ignored his calls for two days. He still remembered her face when he finally caught her in her office at the Foundation, she had gone white when he said the photographer’s name.

“Do not say her name in this house,” Vivian had hissed, her knuckles tight around a porcelain cup. The coffee inside sloshed over the rim and stained the papers on her desk. “Do you understand me, Roman? She is gone! You need to understand it and move on with your life. Dead people don't come back. Whoever that lookalike is, do not bring her into this.”

“Into what?” he had demanded, stepping closer. “What's going on? What are you not telling me?”

But Vivian had left without answering, and the door had shut hard enough to rattle the frame.

He released a sigh. Her reaction fed the suspicion that had been growing in his chest since the gala. He had spent three years learning how to live around the absence of Isabella. He had accepted the Coast Guard reports. He had signed the paperwork. Now his mother was acting like Maya’s existence threatened something.

What was she a threat for? And why was she a threat in the first place?

Roman was done accepting.

He sent Thomas to Maya first. When that failed, he had his legal team send a formal request through her agent. When that was ignored, he called her himself from a number she would not recognize.

“I’m not meeting you in your office,” Maya said as soon as he identified himself. Her voice was sharp and guarded. “And I’m not meeting you anywhere private.”

“Choose the place,” Roman replied instantly. He kept his tone even, but his grip on the phone was hard enough to ache. “Make it public. Make it crowded. I don’t care.”

She heaved a sigh, then named a café on 8th Avenue at 2:00 p.m. The lunch crowd would be thinning, but the tables would still be full. She wanted people around.

Roman understood the choice. He no longer cared how it looked.

Maya walked in at 2:10. She wore a black leather jacket and her mouth was a flat line. She did not sit when she reached his table. She stood with her arms crossed and her weight shifted back, ready to leave.

“Say what you need to say,” she ordered. “I have a shoot at four.”

Roman did not answer right away. He looked at her, and the resemblance hit him again with physical force. It was the shape of her eyes. It was the faint scar through her left eyebrow, the one Isabella had gotten when she was twelve and fell off her bike on Bedford Avenue. It was the way Maya tilted her head when she was angry, like she was measuring him.

He reached into his briefcase and took out a framed photograph. He set it on the table and slid it toward her.

Maya’s expression changed immediately. The anger dropped out of her face. She lowered herself into the chair slowly without speaking and her eyes locked on the image. Her fingers curled around the edge of the table until her knuckles went white.

The woman in the photograph was on a sailboat, laughing, her hair tangled by the wind. She wore a white sundress and a silver bracelet on her right wrist. Her smile was wide and unguarded.

She was identical to Maya…..no! She was a spitting image of Maya!

“That was my wife,” Roman uttered in a hushed voice. “Her name was Isabella. She disappeared three years ago during a storm off Montauk. The Coast Guard searched for nine days……. They never recovered her.”

Maya finally lifted her gaze. Her face had gone bloodless. “What,” she whispered, then stopped. She swallowed. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m saying you look like her,” Roman replied with heavy eyes. “You move like her. You have her mannerisms. My mother saw you and reacted like she’d seen someone she buried.”

Maya stood so fast her chair scraped against the tile. A man at the next table looked up from his laptop. “You think I’m her,” she accused, and her voice rose enough that the barista glanced over. “You lost your wife and now you’re seeing things. I understand that you're grieving. But you’re looking for similarities where none exist because you can’t accept that she’s gone.”

“That’s not what this is,” Roman insisted in a soft tone. He stood too, keeping the table between them. “I know the difference between grief and what’s in front of me.”

“No, you don’t,” Maya shot back. Her eyes were bright, and her breathing had turned quick and shallow. “You’re projecting your loss onto a stranger. I'm sorry that you lost your wife okay! I'm sorry for your loss. I don’t know who she was, but I’m not her, and that's a fact! I’ve never been on a sailboat in my life.”

She grabbed her bag from the back of the chair. “Stay away from me,” she ordered, and turned toward the door.

Roman let her go. He knew he had pushed hard enough for one day. He watched her shove through the café door and step out onto the sidewalk.

Her jacket sleeve rode up when she reached for the handle.

On her right wrist was a delicate silver bracelet, twisted into a rope design with a small sapphire set into the clasp.

Roman stopped breathing.

He had designed that bracelet himself. He had given it to Isabella on their second anniversary. It had been custom made by a jeweler in Florence. There was only one in the world.

Maya walked away down 8th Avenue, and Roman stood in the middle of the café with the framed photograph still on the table between them….and his heart at his feet in pieces.

She was wearing Isabella’s bracelet.