Page 4 of Her Sun-Drenched Billionaire

Sun-drenched. That was the word for it. The rooftop, the light, the woman standing in it. I’d built a glass house to let light in from every direction, and I’d never once felt what I felt watching Eliza Greer at golden hour with sticky note ink on her fingers and a phone full of voicemails from kids who needed her.

She cared out loud. I’d forgotten what that sounded like.

Thursday evening, the rooftop again. She was telling me about a First Light mentor who’d driven forty-five minutes each way for a year because his mentee lived outside the bus routes. Her eyes were bright and her ears were pink—from the heat, or from the story, or from the fact that I was watching her and she knew it.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“Yeah.” I didn’t look away.

Her flush deepened—cheeks, ears, the V of her collarbone. She looked at the skyline.

“I should go,” she said. “Early morning.”

“Okay.”

She left. I stayed on the rooftop until the light was gone.

I drove home to the glass treehouse and stood in the dark kitchen, looking at the valley through the windows. Every room was dark, and every window showed nothing but my own reflection with the black shape of the trees behind it.

I’d built this house to feel like floating. Tonight, it just felt like hovering. Above everything. Connected to nothing.

Somewhere on a dashboard I hadn’t opened in two years, forty-seven mentorship pairs were running. Two miles south, a woman who knew every kid’s name was sitting in an apartment full of binders and light.

I washed my coffee mug, left it on the counter, and went to bed alone.

3

ELIZA

He’d invited me three times before I said yes.

The first was after a Bitstream session that ran past closing—the barista had started wiping down tables around us and August had said, casually, that his place had coffee and no closing time. I’d laughed and said I had an early meeting.

The second time was on the rooftop, golden hour, the week before the gala, and he’d mentioned the view from his deck in a way that was clearly an invitation I filed away without answering.

The third time was a text, Tuesday night, no preamble.

Come see the house. I’ll make coffee.

I’d been sitting in 3B with the gala binder open on my lap, staring at the seating chart without seeing it. My phone lit up with his name and my stomach did something I wasn’t ready to examine.

I texted back,Tomorrow after Bitstream?

I’ll drive.

Wednesday afternoon, I was in the passenger seat of his truck, heading north out of Pleasure Valley. I’d changed out ofmy usual jeans into a linen skirt and a cotton top without letting myself think too hard about why. He drove with one hand on the wheel. Steady, unhurried. He drove like he wasn’t in a rush to get anywhere, and for some reason, that made my pulse pick up.

The windows were down. Late June in the valley meant thick air and no breeze, and I could smell cut grass and hot asphalt every time we slowed for a turn.

He’d been opening up over the past week—not all at once, but in pieces, the way you pull a thread and the fabric gives a little at a time. At Bitstream on Monday he’d told me about the scholarship program—a nonprofit in his hometown that matched kids with mentors and tutors and gave them a structure to stand inside. He’d been twelve when he started, and his mentor was a retired math teacher named Gil who drove a pickup truck and never missed a session.

“Gil is the reason I passed pre-calc,” he’d said, coffee in both hands, with the faintest pull at the corner of his mouth. The beginning of a smile he didn’t let finish.

He told me the program gave him a community and a reason to believe he could get somewhere. I’d asked what happened to it, and his jaw had done the thing it did—the slow shift, the thought turning over before he let it out.

“Funding ran out,” he’d said. And then he’d changed the subject.

There was more. I could feel it the way you feel a room go quiet before someone speaks. He’d given me the first half of something and kept the rest.