Marry Ex's Billionaire Uncle After Divorce (Aurora and Jasper) novel Chapter 146

Chapter 110 Her Father.

Chapter 110: Her Father

(Author’s POV)

She picked up the rabbit with her foot and nudged it under the bed. By the time the door opened, she was sitting on the edge of the mattress with her hands folded in her lap, her expression soft.

“Don’t let her get to you,” Jasper said. He sat beside her. “She’ll come around. And I promise you – next year, once things settle with the Everett side, we’ll have a proper ceremony. Something real.”

Sienna knew exactly what that promise was worth. William had done Jasper a favor, not extended him an invitation into the family. The Everett main line would never host a celebration for this marriage. “Next year” was a placeholder, not a plan. She had heard enough promises to know the difference.

But she leaned her head against his shoulder anyway, and she let him believe she was comforted, and she thought about the courthouse date and what she still needed to do before then.

Her phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Sebastian.

*Found something interesting about Aurora’s mother. Come by the office.*

She sat up. “It’s an old friend,” she said. “I should go.”

Jasper nodded without asking questions. He never did.

She was in her car within ten minutes.

Sebastian’s office was on the fourteenth floor of the Rathbone building. He was waiting for her with a folder already open on the desk, and he slid it toward her without preamble when she sat down. Sebastian had always been efficient. It was the quality she valued most in him, and the one that made him dangerous to everyone else.

“I had someone dig into Martha Higgins,” he said. “Aurora’s mother. You mentioned she’d always been strange about it – fawning over you, cold toward her own daughter. Turns out there’s a reason.”

Sienna looked at the first page.

“Martha was already divorced from her first husband when she got pregnant with Aurora,” Sebastian said. “The man she was with at the time – Aurora’s biological father – wasn’t the man she later married. Wasn’t Leo’s father.”

Sienna looked up.

“His name is Neil Dawson.” Sebastian’s voice was flat, the way it always was when he was presenting something he considered particularly useful. “Started out in import-export. Did reasonably well for a while. Then he developed a gambling problem. Lost everything. He’s been in debt for years – serious debt, the kind that doesn’t go away. Current whereabouts are unclear.”

Chapter 110. Her Father

Sienna set the page down.

“So Aurora and Leo,” she said slowly.

25 Ports

“Half-siblings. Same mother, different fathers.” Sebastian leaned back. “And Neil Dawson didn’t know that his daughter had just received a substantial sum of money from the divorce settlement.”

The room was quiet for a moment.

Sienna thought about it. A man with nothing, drowning in debt, who suddenly discovers he has a daughter a daughter who has money, connections, a powerful new husband. A man like that wouldn’t ask politely. He wouldn’t write a letter. He would show up, and he would not let go.

She thought about Aurora’s face. That careful, composed expression she always wore. The way she held herself together like she’d had a lot of practice at it, like composure was something she had built rather than something she had been given.

She thought about what it would look like when that composure finally broke.

The folder was still open on the desk. Sienna reached out and closed it.

“I’ll take that,” she said.

(Aurora’s POV)

I was at my workstation in the research lab, halfway through annotating a data set, when my phone lit up on the desk beside me.

Eleanor Everett.

I picked it up.

*I’m downstairs, dear. Are you free for lunch? Nothing formal – I just thought it would be nice.*

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something more expected.

Eleanor was downstairs. Now. On a Tuesday, at half past eleven, outside my office building, asking if I was free for lunch. I had no idea what had prompted this. We’d had dinner together at the estate, and she’d been warm – genuinely warm, the kind that didn’t feel performed, the kind I hadn’t quite known what to do with – but an unannounced visit to my workplace was something else entirely. Something more deliberate. Eleanor Everett did not do things without intention.

I glanced at the data set still open on my screen, at the half-finished annotations I’d been working through since nine, then at Sylvia across the bench, who was pipetting something with great concentration and hadn’t noticed my phone light up.

“I need to step out for lunch,” I said. “Can you keep an eye on the incubation timer?”

Sylvia looked up. “Sure. Everything okay?”

Chapter 110. Her Father

“Fine.” I was already reaching for my jacket. “Just a family thing.”

The words came out more naturally than I expected. I wasn’t sure when I had started thinking of it that

way.

1 typed back quickly: *Of course. Give me five minutes and I’ll come down

I set my phone in my pocket and stood up, and I tried to think of any reason Eleanor Everett would come to find me in the middle of a workday. I couldn’t come up with one that didn’t feel significant.

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