Chapter 4 – What Willow Decided

“I need some time to think about this,” Willow said, understandably unsettled by the scale of what Elias had concealed, even accounting for the sympathetic motive behind it. “Not because I care about the money. Because I care about being lied to, even for what might have been a decent reason.”

Elias, respecting the boundary though it cost him considerable anxiety, gave her the space she’d requested, uncertain whether two months of genuine connection would survive the revelation or simply become another entry in his growing list of relationships that couldn’t withstand the truth of his wealth once it finally surfaced.

Willow spent the following week working through her own complicated reaction — genuine hurt at the deception, tangled uncomfortably with the recognition that the man she’d genuinely enjoyed talking to for two months was, in every way that had actually mattered to their conversations, exactly who he’d presented himself to be.

“The consulting work thing was technically true,” she admitted to her sister, working through the situation aloud. “He just left out a few pretty significant details about the scale of it.”

“Do you actually like him,” her sister asked, cutting through the deliberation with the particular directness only a sibling could offer. “Separate from the money question entirely. Do you like the guy who asked follow-up questions and remembered your bad client stories?”

Willow considered the question honestly, recognizing, somewhat to her own surprise, that the answer had never actually been in doubt, whatever complications the revelation had introduced around it.