Climbing those high metal steps was torture. Every lift of my body tugged viciously at my stitches. The driver gave one brief look at my bloodless face and the newborn tucked under my cashmere shawl, but said nothing. I lowered myself into a window seat and shielded my son from the shaking road.
As the bus jolted through Manhattan, two years of quiet endurance replayed in my head. Buspass deals
Dominic had no idea who I really was. He believed my father was a retired contractor with “a few decent plots of land” upstate and a small construction company. I had let him believe it because I had been certain it would prove he loved me for myself, not for the weight of the Brooks name.
At first, Dominic had been attentive. Loyal. Ambitious, certainly, but charming. Then his tech startup began receiving serious seed capital from major institutional funds, and something in him changed. He became unbearably proud. His mother started calling me a “dependent burden,” while Natalie often implied I had lucked into marrying “a man destined for the tech elite.”
None of them were intelligent enough to understand why those institutional funds had opened their doors. They did it because they knew I was the only heiress of Charles Brooks, founder of Brooks Global Corp, one of the strongest infrastructure conglomerates in the nation.
