Eric pressed a hand to his lower abdomen and eased out of the chair.
The C-section incision tugged with every step—a hot, tight pull that made him feel held together by staples and sheer denial. His breasts throbbed, swollen and tender; even the brush of the hospital gown against his skin sparked fresh, bright pain.
He shuffled back toward the suite. Linda hovered at his side like weather—dark, oppressive, unavoidable—her voice sharp enough to cut.
"You call yourself a mother? You sat there forever and that poor baby was still crying. They had to resort to donor colostrum!"
Eric kept his head down. He offered no defense. The body wasn't his. The shame shouldn't have been his. But the pain—God, the pain—was. And Linda's contempt worked on him slowly, like grit under skin.
Beside them, Eleanor watched "herself" limp along, wrung out to the bone.
A cold shiver ran up her spine. If she were trapped in that body, forced through the nursing and the nagging and the constant policing, she would have cracked hours ago.
A thought hit her—ugly, selfish, instantaneous: If we ever switch back, please let it be after this part is over. After the babies are off the breast.
She loved her daughters. That didn't mean she wanted to be the one enduring this particular brand of hell.
Linda shot Eric a look of pure disgust.
"What's with the face? Honestly. Anyway, Eric is back, so I'm leaving. I have better things to do than stand around here being annoyed by you."
And then she was gone—heels clicking a sharp, rhythmic retreat down the hall.
The suite door clicked shut.
Silence.
Just the two of them.
Eric's blue eyes—Eleanor's eyes—flashed with jagged resentment.
"Look at me," he rasped, voice scraping the quiet raw. "Look at what you've done. Are you satisfied?" He swallowed hard, gaze flicking toward the hallway as if Linda might materialize through the walls. "I just want to take care of the babies in peace. Maybe we should tell my mother the truth. At least then she'll stop—"
Eleanor's mouth curved into a smile that offered no comfort.
Only ice.
"Go ahead. Tell her." She stepped into his space, tall and unmovable. "But remember—when the psychiatrist shows up, the more you insist you're a man trapped in a woman's body, the crazier you're going to sound."
The words landed like a slap.
Whatever hope he'd been holding onto collapsed right there. He knew his mother. He knew the world. He went quiet—dead quiet.
Eleanor didn't wait for a rebuttal. She turned and walked out.
—
The next day: Aethel Corp headquarters.
"Eric" moved through the lobby without slowing down, glass and steel throwing back a reflection that looked sharper than before—harder around the edges, more dangerous in the eyes.
She cut straight to the executive wing and gave a single, perfunctory knock on the CFO's door.
Jake Parker was Eric's college buddy. Same appetite for risk. Same ambition dressed up as confidence. Eric had brought him in early; Jake had climbed fast—from nobody to CFO in under eight years.
Jake opened the door with a ready grin. It faded the moment he registered Eric's face.
"Jake," "Eric" said, voice flat, leaving no room for debate. "I need the last two years of financial statements. Project-level inflows and outflows. Every contract. Every invoice. Every offshore transaction record. Everything. Organized. On my desk. Now."
Jake blinked. He'd seen Eric stressed before, but not like this—never this cold.
Still. The man in front of him was the CEO.
"Okay," Jake said carefully. "Sure. How deep do you want me to dig?"
"As deep as it goes." "Eric" didn't blink. "I want every expense line accounted for. Nothing is too small to matter."
Jake swallowed; his Adam's apple bobbed hard. "Got it."
He hesitated, eyes narrowing as something clicked into place. "You mean… the ledger? The one off the books?"
"Eric" held his stare, calm as a closed door. "Yes. You know exactly which one."
Jake looked confused—maybe even spooked—but he didn't push. An hour later, he hauled stacks of binders and thick folders into Eric's private office, shoulders straining under the weight.
Eleanor waited until he left. Then she locked the door and got to work.
The ledgers sprawled across the mahogany desk like a graveyard. No shared drives. No email trails. No digital breadcrumbs. Nothing a regulator could subpoena or a hacker could intercept. This was the real Aethel Corp—the one that lived behind closed doors and handshakes.
Everything was there: original account books from the last two years, tax filings, internal management reports, contracts, invoices, receipts. Hundreds of pages of secrets pretending to be numbers.
Eleanor turned each sheet with meticulous care, reading every line item twice. As she worked, fragments of Eleanor Averill's memory began to snap into place inside Eric's skull.
It wasn't nostalgia. It was a cold accounting of what she'd paid for.
She'd been groomed for this. Born into old money and educated at the best schools, she'd been raised with the casual competence of people who never wonder if they belong in the room.
Her father—a majority shareholder in a public empire—could shift markets with one phone call. Her mother—a powerhouse philanthropist and art collector—could walk into any space and make it hers. As their only child, Eleanor had been raised like a crown princess: elite training, effortless polish, and a razor-sharp head for numbers honed by a lifetime spent close to power.
She could spot a discrepancy in a spreadsheet like a bruise on skin.
Her parents had adored her. They'd spoiled her and, more importantly, protected her. But that protection left a soft spot in her armor: she'd never been taught to mistrust money—or the men who were hungry for it.
Then came college.
Then came Eric Davis.
Working-class kid from the South. Handsome in that effortless, magazine-cover way—trustable face, practiced smile, eyes that could look sincere without ever being vulnerable. He pursued her with an intensity she mistook for devotion. Blue eyes, deep and pleading. Silver tongue, always ready. There was raw hunger behind every word, no matter how he dressed it up in romance.
He wasn't like the trust-fund boys Eleanor had grown up around—the ones who treated ambition like an accessory. Eric clawed for every inch he gained. With him, she told herself her world was expanding.
They fell fast. Hard.
Her parents fought the match every step. The gap between their families—wealth, values, pedigree—wasn't a divide. It was a canyon. Eleanor, high on idealism, treated their disapproval like proof their love was real. A romance under siege. She even ran away to force their hand.
In the end, her parents caved because they loved her more than they hated him.
But they never trusted him.
They insisted on a rock-solid prenup. Eric signing it was his official entry into their world—and, later, the first receipt in a long ledger.
After the wedding, Eric became their son-in-law by necessity. For Eleanor's sake, her parents poured capital into his fledgling company. They approved a massive initial capital request from her dynasty trust—a staggering cash injection to jumpstart his construction firm, Aethel Corp.
Eleanor walked away from her own dreams of becoming a jewelry designer and poured her life into Eric's. She handled hiring, team-building, logistics, resource management. With her father's connections greasing the gears, Eric went from fresh-faced civil engineer to powerhouse CEO almost overnight.
And she was the one who cleaned up the earliest blood.
One of Eric's first projects had been a disaster—corner-cutting, negligence, the kind of "minor" shortcuts that only look minor until someone gets hurt. Then came the job-site accident. Multiple injuries. Grieving families. The media circling like sharks. Aethel staring down damages, criminal negligence charges, and the loss of its operating license.
Bankruptcy wasn't a possibility. It was a certainty.
It was Eleanor's father who stepped in and fixed it—deploying elite attorneys, managing quiet settlements, making the necessary calls to regulators and editors. Eric avoided a prison cell. Aethel survived.
That crisis should have broken them.
Instead, it made him.
After the accident, Eric changed. He got harder. Bolder. More willing to do whatever it took to win. In less than six years, Aethel exploded from a skeleton crew into a powerhouse with hundreds of employees—a glossy local success story pulling in over a hundred million in annual revenue.
Then, at the peak of it all—the crash.
Eleanor's parents boarded a private plane for a major charity gala. The plane went down. Neither survived.
Their deaths snapped something loose in Eric. The invisible leash—the only reason he'd bothered to play nice—was gone.
While Eleanor was still raw with grief, he came at her with the sweet talk. He pitched a postnup as a "partnership agreement," proof of deeper commitment to her and the company. In reality, he was quietly carving out rights to her family's assets, piece by piece, like a man slicing a cake he didn't bake.
Once he had what he wanted, her sacrifices stopped mattering. In the office he became a dictator. At home he turned colder by the month. And the fact they'd been married for over a decade without children became Linda's favorite weapon.
The pressure was relentless: produce an heir. Secure the legacy. Do your duty.
Cornered and desperate, Eleanor finally got pregnant. She told herself a baby would be the reset button their marriage needed.
Instead, Eric's "late nights" multiplied. His business trips stretched longer. The distance between them turned into a chasm.
Then she found the second phone—hidden under a pillow, set to silent.
And finally, she saw the truth for what it was.
The shock hit hard. Premature labor. The sudden, terrifying rush of her water breaking. Then blackness.
When she surfaced from the dark, she wasn't herself anymore.
She was Eric.
The clearer the memories became, the hotter Eleanor's rage burned. Every suspicious line item in Aethel's books was a fresh reminder of the truth: her love, her family's legacy, her future—stepping-stones. Nothing more.
Fine.
If that was all she'd been to him, then these numbers would be the thing that buried him.
Eleanor gathered the documents and locked them into a reinforced briefcase. They weren't accounting records anymore.
They were ammunition.
And she didn't waste a second.
Briefcase in hand, she strode out of Eric's office, got into his car, and drove straight back to Sarah Hoffman's firm.
---------- 💬 Author's Note ----------
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