Chapter 12
T here are very few things I take pride in. Seeing a problem before it turns costly. Building my company without my father’s name opening doors for me. Being Yara’s husband.
The first was learned brutally.
My father used to say that every problem has a point of origin.
Nothing begins when it finally becomes visible.
By then, the damage is already underway.
The real beginning is always earlier—a shit decision, an overlooked detail, a weakness somebody failed to take seriously.
He liked to test me on that when I was a boy.
He would place a situation in front of me—a deal gone bad, a family slight, a servant dismissed, a headline he disliked—and ask the only question that mattered.
What set it in motion? He had no interest in the wreckage at the end.
He wanted the first fracture, the small miscalculation that made the rest inevitable.
If I failed to find it quickly enough, he corrected me with his fists until I was bleeding on the floor.
For a long time, that was my weakness. I noticed problems too late.
I saw consequences before I saw cause. I only understood what something was once it had already taken shape.
That changed when I got out from under my parents’ roof and built a life no one handed me.
A cramped office above a laundromat taught me more than my father’s house ever did.
By the time I turned that office into a company and that company into an empire, tracing a problem back to its source had become instinct.
Which is why the unease needling the back of my mind irritates me.
Isabel is smiling. Brightly.
Under other circumstances, I would take it as a good sign.
After everything surrounding her father’s death, a smile is easier to look at than grief.
Easier than tears, and the brittle composure she has been wearing.
Even so, I cannot shake the feeling that I am looking at something I should have understood sooner.
Maybe it is the pretext she used to get in. My mother.
“Are you going to invite me to sit,” Isabel says, glancing at the chair across from my desk, “or are you going to keep me standing here?”
I take my seat and gesture for her to do the same. “Why are you here? What does my mother want?”
“I—” She balks, clearly not expecting me to go straight for the point. I do not have time for hesitation. It is nearly six, and I need to get home to my wife. I have already been away from her far too long.
“I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
She drops her gaze to her hands. A second later, tears slide down her cheeks.
For fuck’s sake.
I exhale slowly, locking down the irritation before it reaches my face. I slide the box of tissues across the desk.
“Stop crying, Isabel. I’ve had a shitty day, and none of it has anything to do with you.”
Her head lifts at once. Hope flickers in her tear-bright eyes, caught in the last of the evening light.
“Really?”
The change is abrupt enough to put me on alert. One second she is crying. The next, there is something almost buoyant in her voice.
Something about her had been off since her father’s funeral, but at the time, I couldn’t place it. I chalked it up to time. A decade is long enough to change a person and blur whatever certainty memory once had. Now I know better.
“Yes,” I say. “Now get to the point.”
Isabel sniffs and reaches for a tissue, blotting at her tears. “I’m sorry, Xavi. I told myself I wasn’t going to do this.”
The pause that follows is expectant.
I say nothing. I’m too drained to feel anything at this point.
She clears her throat. “After I dropped you off yesterday, your mother reached out.”
That does not surprise me. Only the cold, familiar certainty that whatever comes next will have my mother’s fingerprints all over it.
“Of course she did.”
Isabel reaches into her bag, pulls out a leather folder, and sets it on the desk between us. “The notaire handling Papá’s estate here met with us this morning.”
That, at least, explains why she came to the Riviera.
Eduardo ran one of the largest wineries in Europe.
His principal vineyards were in Spain, but part of the business was here too—the Provencal estate that produced his French label, the Cap-Ferrat villa where he hosted buyers for private tastings, and the French holding company that held both.
Enough of his empire sat on this side of the border to make a Riviera notaire unavoidable.
That still doesn’t explain why she’s here.
I look at the folder. “And?”
Her throat works before she answers. “He named you.”
My stare fixes on her. “For what?”
“As executor on this side of the estate,” she says quietly. “But not just that. Papá also left the holdings here in your hands until everything is settled. The notaire said he wanted someone he trusted to carry out his instructions.”
My brows draw together as I try to make sense of it.
Eduardo had said something like this once, years ago, in front of my parents.
Something about leaving this side of the business to me if anything ever happened to him.
At seventeen, I’d taken it for one of his grander jokes.
Back then, I was still the stupid Navarro.
The disappointing one. The son nobody expected much from .
Not once did I think he would actually do it.
The truth slots into place, and everything clicks with a clarity I fucking hate.
“You were the closest thing he had to a son.”
Silence settles over the room.
I look away first, out through the floor-to-ceiling glass, my jaw locking so hard it aches. Outside, the sky has darkened to ink.
My marriage. My family. Isabel. Eduardo’s estate. Less than twenty-four hours, and everything has gone to hell.
I turn back to her. “When did my mother know?”
“I told her yesterday. We met with the notaire this morning.” Isabel presses her lips together, like she already knows how that sounds.
“I shouldn’t have said anything, but I was upset, and she sounded so…
” She swallows. “Kind. Concerned. And after everything she said, I came to find you. She told me you wouldn’t refuse Papá’s wishes. ”
Right.
I place my elbows on the desk and brace my head between my hands. Getting any closer to this will only make the damage worse.
A slight touch on my face snaps me out of my exhaustion and confusion at once.
I knock her hand away, not caring if it slams against the damn wood.
She winces, rubbing at her wrist. “I-I’m sorry. I was trying to see… what happened to your face?”
My anger surges up, instant and monstrous, crashing through me with a force I didn’t know I was capable of.
I glare at her. At the fucking audacity.
At the way she still doesn’t seem to understand the line she keeps crossing.
I should’ve shut it down in the car yesterday, the second she pulled that stunt.
But I made the mistake of showing restraint, knowing the state she was in. Clearly, that was my mistake.
“Do not touch me again,” I say, my voice low enough to make her go still. “Yesterday, I let it pass. That was consideration, not permission. I’m married, Isabel. Get that through your head, and do not make me repeat myself.”
Tears gather in her eyes again, but they stir nothing in me.
“I promised Eduardo I would see you protected. That promise still stands. But do not confuse that with anything else. Do you understand me?”
She nods, biting her bottom lip, and when she finally speaks, the words come out low and unsteady. “You hate me, don’t you? You always have. Since we were kids. You hate me for everything that happened, and now you’re going to leave me, just like everyone else did.”
I don’t know what she expects me to say. Hate is too simple a word for whatever sits between us. Hate would require heat. Choice. What I feel when I look at her is older and colder than that—duty, fatigue, and a debt that never stopped collecting.
I have known Isabel since I was seven, back in the coastal town in Spain where our families decided familiarity was close enough to fate.
She had always been sensitive, easily overwhelmed, soft in a way that made people protective of her.
Until today, I thought that softness, along with how close our families were, was the reason mine wanted us together.
Maybe that was part of it. But by the time I was old enough to object, her mother was dead, mine had already turned expectation into obligation, and saying no would have made me the villain in a story I’d never been given the power to rewrite.
We became official at nineteen. At least that is what our families called it.
In truth, it was never what she wanted it to be.
That same year, my father beat me until part of my scalp split open because I’d refused to become the son he wanted, unlike Lucien, who had always known how to wear obedience like virtue.
That was the night I finally walked out of that house, emptied my mother’s jewelry case, and fled back to Spain.
Eduardo found me a few weeks later, halfway through a part-time shift I’d taken while trying to get back into university and finish the economics degree I’d been forced to abandon.
He took one look at me, told me to stop being proud, and dragged me home with him.
I lived under his roof from nineteen until twenty-three, long enough to finish my degree.
During those years, refusing Isabel outright felt even more impossible.
Eduardo had given me shelter, and I knew exactly what it would look like if I repaid that by humiliating his daughter.
So I stayed, and I let the thing exist in name more than substance.
I told myself time might do what duty had not, that affection might grow where obligation had taken root first. But every time Isabel reached for more, I gave her the same answer: not yet.
We never got past that. Maybe some part of me knew we never would.
By twenty-three, she was offered a postgraduate conservation placement in Greece. She took it, and whatever had existed between us ended there. Not long after, I left for London to begin my master’s in finance.
A year later, at twenty-four, I met my wife.
Until her, I had never understood why people spoke about love as if it were something worth destroying yourself for.
Yara made me want the kind of life I’d long ago taught myself not to reach for—a home that felt warm when I walked into it, children with her eyes and my name who would grow up knowing what safety felt like and never fear the sound of their father coming down the hall.
A life that belonged to me because I chose it.
One look at her, and the future stopped feeling like a sentence.
It started feeling like something I would burn the world down to keep.
I loved her with a force that should’ve warned me.
Instead, it drove me into several stupid decisions that still haunt me.
After I proposed, I went back to that house because by then my mother had started reaching for me again, and some damaged part of me wanted to believe I could walk back in as a man they could no longer control.
Maybe I wanted to see whether they would look at me differently now.
They didn’t. All I did was drag my wife into the line of fire.
I stare at the folder in front of me and let out a slow breath. Eduardo had done too much for me to dismiss this out of hand. But obligation has limits, and mine ends where my wife begins.
“Your father entrusted me with seeing his instructions carried out, and I will honor that. But from this point forward, every matter concerning the estate goes through the notaire and my counsel. No private meetings. No calls. No messages. You will have the legal protection your father intended. What you will not have is personal access to me.”
“Xavi.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Please don’t say that. I’m trying so hard to be strong right now. I have no one left.”
“You have my mother.”
Her eyes widen .
Then I hear it.
A faint scraping sound.
It takes me a second to place it. My gaze drops to her hands, and I’m already moving.
I come around the desk and catch both wrists before she can do more damage. The bandages are half ruined, gauze split where her nails have clawed through it, fresh blood beginning to seep through white.
“Stop.”
Her breath catches. She tries to jerk away. I tighten my grip just enough to keep her still.
I know this now. The moment her eyes go distant, I know what comes next.
A few days ago, I found her stepping off a curb and into the path of an oncoming car with that same vacant expression, as if the world around her had gone distant and soundless.
I got to her in time. Dragged her back onto the pavement hard enough to throw us both off balance.
Even then, she only stared at me, dazed, like she needed a second to understand how close she had come to being killed.
I stayed until a doctor got to her. Long enough to hear the warning delivered in a tone that left no room for interpretation: she was not to be left alone in that condition.
I release Isabel’s wrists and reach for the desk phone.
“Claire.”
Moments later, the door opens.
My assistant steps inside, takes one look at Isabel, and doesn’t hesitate. That alone is worth every cent I pay her.
“Call Dr. Laurent and have him here immediately,” I say, grabbing my keys. “She is not to be left alone. Stay with her until he arrives. If he can’t make it in time, have Benoit take her to the clinic.”
She nods. “Of course.”
I grab my phone, shrug into my coat, and stride out of the office. By the time the elevator doors slide shut, I’m already dialing my wife again.