You Want My Grandma’s $8 BILLION Inheritance DREAM ON! SCUMBAG, Watch Your Empire COLLAPSE Overnight! Chapter 03
I didn’t go home.
I went back to the law firm.
Julian was still there. When he saw me, he froze for a moment.
“Ms. Grant?”
“The asset sale agreements. I’ll sign them now.”
He hesitated.
“Some of the buyers haven’t finalized their offers yet…”
“Use the prices they’ve already quoted,” I said. “Everything needs to be completed within seven days.”
Julian looked at me.
He didn’t ask a single question.
He simply laid the documents out in front of me.
I signed them one by one.
Grant Hotels Group.
My grandmother’s seaside estate.
All the commercial properties in New York.
The resorts.
The office buildings.
The eight-billion-dollar empire my grandmother had spent sixty years building…
I sold half of it within a single afternoon.
The buyers for the remaining assets were out of state. They were already scheduled to fly in over the next few days to finalize the contracts.
After I signed the last document, I put down my pen.
“Thank you, Mr. Ward.”
Julian let out a quiet sigh.
“Ms. Grant, whatever happened… I’ll be here whenever you need me.”
I smiled faintly.
As I walked out of the firm, a detail suddenly came back to me.
Alex went to Langford’s private hospital once every month.
He always said it was just a routine checkup.
There were a few times I wanted to go with him.
But he would always brush me off.
“If you come along, I’ll just have to worry about taking care of you too. Stay home and wait for me, okay?”
Looking back now…
He wasn’t going for checkups.
He was probably taking Sophia to her prenatal appointments.
And I…
I was just a fool who had been deceived for seven years.
My phone rang.
A text message from an unknown number appeared.
There was only one sentence.
**Do you remember the “tonic” from seven years ago?**
My hand tightened around my phone.
Seven years ago.
One month before my wedding, Diane Langford had personally made me a tonic.
She told me it was a family recipe passed down for generations.
A fertility remedy.
She said drinking it would help me get pregnant more easily.
I had been deeply moved.
I drank every drop.
After that, I never got pregnant again.
I saw countless specialists.
I went through endless tests.
Every doctor told me the same thing.
That I had “abnormal ovarian function.”
Alex had held me in his arms and comforted me.
He said it didn’t matter.
He said he didn’t care whether we had children.
That having me was enough.
I believed him.
But now, this message was telling me something else.
That tonic…
Maybe it hadn’t been meant to help me get pregnant.
Maybe it had been meant to make me infertile.
I called the number back.
The phone rang three times before someone answered.
A woman’s voice came through.
Soft.
Hushed.
Like she was afraid someone might hear.
“Ms. Grant… I’m Carla. Carla who used to cook for the Langford family. Do you remember me?”
I remembered.
She had worked as the Langford family’s chef for ten years.
Three years ago, she had suddenly been fired.
Everyone said she had returned to her hometown.
“That tonic…” Her voice trembled. “It wasn’t just Diane’s idea. She made it together with Sophia. I saw them prepare it with my own eyes.”
“Why are you only telling me this now?”
“Because…”
She went quiet for a long time.
“My daughter works for Langford Corporation. They used that to threaten me before. They told me I couldn’t say anything.”
She took a shaky breath.
“But my daughter quit last month. I don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
“What else?”
“Sophia has two children.”
Her voice dropped lower.
“Twins. They’re three years old now. They’re being raised at the Langford estate. The family tells everyone they’re children of one of Diane’s relatives.”
I closed my eyes.
Twins.
Three years old.
Which meant that during those years when I had gone through countless IVF procedures…
When I had endured failure after failure…
When I had cried myself to pieces every single time another treatment failed…
Sophia had given him a pair of twins.
“Thank you, Carla.”
I ended the call.
The New York night wind swept in from the ocean.
Cold.
Salty.
I stood beneath the streetlight and scrolled up through my chat history with Alex.
One message after another.
Every single one said:
**Miss you.**
**Love you.**
**Waiting for you to come home.**
Every single one was a lie.
I took screenshots of our conversations and saved them into an encrypted folder.
Then I replied to his latest message.
**Okay, sweetheart. I’ll wait for you to come home.**