Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Miles Hart found me and said I didn’t have to spend every day drowning in misery. If I really couldn’t make the marriage work, divorce was an option.
I bit my lip and held it in for a long time before I finally said, “You’re right. I… I don’t actually need anything else. Money would be enough.”
The moment I said it, Morgan Sterling looked at me as if I had lost my mind.
“You’ve really been pushed too hard.”
He said the money was mine to begin with, and that even if I didn’t remember any of it, I still had to protect what belonged to me.
He said Daniel Cross and Miles had gone too far. There was no reason for me to keep taking the abuse. More importantly, there was no way I would lose.
I froze for a long while. Then, after fighting with myself, I still couldn’t help asking, “Who is Miles?”
Morgan went still.
For a moment, he looked utterly blank. Then he said, carefully, “Claire, I think we should take you to see a doctor.”
The doctor said I had developed selective amnesia after a traumatic trigger. Morgan hurriedly asked, “What year do you think it is?”
I thought about it and said, “The year I turned eighteen. Didn’t I just finish college applications?”
Morgan fell silent.
Then he started laughing so hard his eyes nearly disappeared. He laughed until I raised a fist and hit him.
Through his laughter, he said, “This amnesia of yours is kind of perfect. Right. You’re eighteen. Eighteen is great. No Daniel Cross. No children. No Miles… only me…”
I punched him again.
After I finally stopped punching him, I forced the conversation back to something useful and made Ethan lay everything out for me, piece by piece.
He didn’t sound impatient. If anything, he sounded like he was reciting a business summary.
By the time he was done, I was staring at him in silence.
So the reality was this: I wasn’t eighteen. I was thirty-eight.
I had a daughter who was twenty and a son who was seventeen. Daniel Cross was my husband. Or had been, depending on how you looked at it. And the money I had under my name was enough to make my head spin.
Ethan counted it off calmly. Twenty percent of the marital assets. Ten percent of the company shares. The suburban house, too. Altogether, it was worth nearly nine billion dollars.
I just looked at him.
“Aren’t you making this up?” I asked after a long moment.
He gave me a sideways glance. “Why would I lie to you?”
I still couldn’t quite believe it.
Chapter 2
Eighteen years had gone missing from my memory, and I was supposed to accept that in that time I’d married Daniel Cross, had two children, built up a fortune, and somehow ended up with a life so complicated it felt completely unreal.
Even after everything Ethan said, something about it still didn’t sit right with me.
I’m reconstructing the damaged chapter text from the surviving Chinese and the continuity graph, then I’ll render it as clean English prose with the same scene beat and no extra plot.I never actually met the man Ethan had mentioned. The one who handled things was the lawyer.
After spending a little time sorting everything out according to Ethan’s instructions, I ran through all the properties under my name. Just the monthly income came to at least $1.2 million. If I added the money sitting in the company accounts too, I looked up from the figures and realized the total was close to $2.2 million.
I stared at the numbers, completely stunned.
Ethan was half-sprawled on the sofa, looking so exhausted that even his usual edge had gone dull. I brought him a glass of water, and he took it with a tired sigh, complaining that the company had buried him in work lately and that he was about to fall apart from it.
I let him talk for a while before I finally cut in. “You say that like you’ve never taken care of me before.”
He went quiet.
We had grown up together in the same foster home. When we were little, I was the one who bought his food and washed his clothes, and later, when I was in night school, he was already out working. He was busier than I was, but he still looked after me whenever he could. If I needed anything, he never ignored me.
In the end, it had always been him supporting me.
Ethan looked at me with that familiar, almost helpless expression, as if all of it was nothing worth making a fuss over. By then my head was already starting to ache, and I pressed my fingers to my temple.
Then one thought settled in, clear and impossible to shake.
Maybe I should go to New York.
Ethan agreed in that quiet, unruffled way of his, as if the whole thing was no big deal.
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I wasn’t eighteen anymore. I couldn’t keep pretending I could make every decision on impulse and deal with the fallout later.
He looked at me and said that if I was really going to New York, I needed money. Plenty of it. Not just enough to get by for a day or two, but enough to settle in and live on while I got myself together.
I tried to give him a straight answer. In the end, all I could say was that I did need money.
Chapter 3
Ethan’s expression didn’t change much. He just gave me a faint, almost helpless look, as if I was the one making a fuss over something that was already settled. Then he let the matter go. That was Ethan Sterling: once he decided something, he never bothered to drag it out.
A few days later, I put on business attire and went to the corporate office.
Ethan had arranged for me to start there as his assistant, and I knew better than to treat that lightly.
New York was already awake when I left home, all hard light, traffic noise, and people moving too fast to spare anyone a second glance. I carried a cup of coffee in one hand and kept reminding myself to stay focused.
This was work. I had chosen it. Since I was here, I needed to do it properly.
I forced myself to remember every instruction, every face, every detail. I had to learn fast and adapt fast. If I couldn’t even handle a simple assistant job, then all the resolve in the world would be useless.
By the time I stepped through the office doors, I had already steadied my breathing.
That was how my new life officially began.
At the corporate office, Ethan Sterling was always finding work for me. Every time I thought I was catching up, he handed me something else, and if I stood there waiting for instructions, I was already behind.
He never really gave me a gentler way in. Most of what I had to handle, I had to learn from scratch, and I failed more often than I got it right. At first, I was barely keeping up at all.
But little by little, Ethan’s standards became the standards I measured myself against. Even the things he expected started to feel normal. More and more, he piled onto my desk, and after work every night I went straight to night school.
I studied office software and all the practical skills I had never properly learned before. My notebooks filled up page after page.
After a full year of night classes, I finally made it through. By then, I had already started to adapt.