Her Celestial Farm on the Scrapyard Planet novel Chapter 350

Chapter 350 A Crack in the Door

Richard ran out of breath before he ran out of anger. He pressed a hand to his throbbing temple, eyes fixed on Claire with something close to hatred. “Do you understand what you’ve done? Because of your stupidity, every shareholder, every affiliate, the entire Rhodes family name, all of it, is blacklisted along with NovaSea Transport. Do you have any idea what that means? It means we may have just lost our only shot at resources that could save lives. My life. And you handed that away like it was nothing

Claire had gone pale, her whole body trembling. Every word landed like a blow, but it was that last part, the part about saving lives, that finally cut through. The scale of what she’d done was starting to take shape. and it was bigger than she’d let herself imagine.

“I didn’t mean for it to go that far,” she managed, hand still pressed to her cheek, tears running freely. “They provoked me. Her and that kid. If I hadn’t seen them, I never would have”

Richard cut her off with a sharp look. “Tell me about them. The woman and the boy. What’s the history there?”

The report he’d seen only confirmed that the two were somehow connected to his son-in-law Elliot’s past, but the details had never come up.

Claire told him, haltingly, between sobs.

Not long after her wedding, a woman had shown up at the door claiming to be Elliot’s wife and that the child was his.

Claire, still wrapped up in the warmth of a new marriage she hadn’t wanted to jeopardize, had kept it from Richard.

Instead, she’d turned all of her fury on the mother and son, making their lives so unbearable they’d had no choice but to scrape by on a garbage planet. She’d assumed they were dead in some forgotten corner of the universe by now. She hadn’t expected to walk into a thriving farm and find them staring back at her.

Richard’s expression darkened further as he listened. When she finished, he said nothing for a long moment. Then, without another word to Claire, he reached across the desk and pressed the communicator.

“Send Elliot to my study. Now.”

A few minutes later, a well-dressed man of middling years stepped in, his manner composed and quietly deferential, though something behind his eyes had always carried the look of a man carefully managing himself. Elliot, Claire’s husband, who had married into the Rhodes family.

“Dad. You wanted to see me?” He gave Richard a respectful nod, then let his gaze drift briefly to Claire, her tear-streaked face still bearing the mark of Richard’s hand, and to Adrian, who looked genuinely frightened. Something shifted in Elliot’s expression, there and gone before anyone could name it.

Richard didn’t ease into it. He laid out Claire’s performance at the farm and its fallout in a few blunt sentences, then fixed Elliot with a steady look. “Elliot. The woman Claire mentioned. Abigail Turner, and her son. Do you remember them?”

Elliot went very still for just a fraction of a second. Then his eyes dropped and his voice came out level.

ظ /

8:56 am Pppp.

Chapter 350 A Crack in the Door

enter

Pinched

“Dad, that was a long time ago. I was young and I made a mistake. I cut all contact afterward. Claire knows I’ve regretted it.”

Claire shot him a look that could have stripped paint.

Richard waved a hand. “I’m not interested in relitigating the past. What I’m asking is whether there’s any possibility of you approaching the boy. Paul. Acknowledging him. Or at the very least, opening some kind of channel.”

Both Claire and Elliot went still.

“Dad.” Claire’s voice broke. “What are you saying? You want that little bastard…”

“Not another word.” Richard’s tone was flat and final. His eyes stayed on Elliot. “Here’s where we stand. We’re blacklisted. The conventional routes are closed. Elizabeth doesn’t respond to pressure or persuasion. She runs by her own rules and nothing else. But she protects her people fiercely. Today she didn’t hesitate to blacklist an entire shipping company over that boy, and she handed out rewards on the spot to strangers who’d spoken up for him.”

He leaned back, fingers tapping a slow rhythm on the desk, the particular sharpness of a man who’d built his fortune on reading situations coming back into his eyes. “Paul is one of hers now, and by all appearances, she values him. If you approached him as his biological father, even if it was just to show some remorse, some interest, maybe it wouldn’t get the blacklist lifted right away. But could it open a back channel? A quiet way to access some of what the farm produces?”

His gaze sharpened. “I’m not asking for much. Enough to test it. Enough to see if the effects are real. If they are, we figure out the next step, whatever it costs. But right now we need a way in, even if it’s just a crack.”

Elliot’s composure finally showed its strain. “Dad, I don’t know how to say this. Abigail hates me. What I did back then, I know how bad it was. And Paul’s never even met me. I’m not sure he’d…”

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