Since the death of his wife, Richard was no longer the man who appeared on business magazine covers. He stopped attending meetings. Stopped returning calls. Stopped caring about the “empire.” The empire could survive without him.
Luna could not.
His life became a strict routine: waking before dawn, preparing breakfast she barely touched, checking her medications, writing down every tiny change in a notebook—every movement, every breath, every slower blink—as if recording it could hold time in place.
But Luna barely spoke. Sometimes she nodded or shook her head. Sometimes not even that. She sat by the window, watching the light as if it didn’t belong to her.
Richard talked to her anyway. He told stories, remembered trips, invented fairy tales, made promises. Still, the distance between them remained—the kind that hurts more when you don’t know how to cross it.
That was when Julia Bennett arrived.
Julia didn’t have the usual shine of someone arriving to work in a mansion. No forced enthusiasm. No confident smile that said, I’ll fix everything. Instead, she carried a quiet calm—the kind that comes after a person has already cried all the tears they had.