Isabella POV I knocked twice on my grandmother’s bedroom door, even though it was widely open, which is not normal.
Her room has always been a place that you cannot easily access.
Not because she ever made me feel unwelcome, but because everything was always so neat and carefully arranged.
Our family photos on the dresser, laptop neatly placed on her reading desk.
The room always smelled like her favorite Lavender oil.
“Come in, honey,” she answered without looking up from her book.
She was sitting up in bed with a book open on her lap and her reading glasses on.
As I walked toward her, she finally looked at my face.
Whatever she saw made her close the book immediately and place it beside her.
I quietly sat on the edge of her bed.
It was the same place I always sat whenever I needed forgiveness.
Whenever I had done something wrong.
Like now.
She moved closer and took both my hands in hers.
Her fingers rubbed gently over my skin.
For a long time, nobody wants to be the first to speak.
That was one thing about my grandmother, Eleanor Hart that I admire.
She never rushed people.
She always waited until you were ready.
“I need to talk about something,” I said.
“I know.” “All of it, this time.” I looked down at our joined hands.
“Not just what happened at Matteo’s apartment.
Everything.” Her fingers tightened around mine.
“Breathe honey.
I’m listening.” So I told her everything I had kept from her, everything I had made excuses for and twisted in my mind for four years, because loving someone can make you very creative with lies.
I told her how, in the early months, Matteo had slowly started controlling my life.
Which friends I could see.
Which coworkers he said were using me.
He always had a reason to control me.
Then I told her about the company shares.
Her hands holding me went still.
“Isabella,” she said quietly, her face giving nothing away.
“I know.” My heart stopped.
“I know about the shares.” “Tell me exactly what happened, dear.” I forced myself to say it, without trying to make my part in it sound better than it was.
“Three months after we got engaged, Matteo brought me papers drawn up by a lawyer I had never heard of, from a law office I didn’t know.
The papers would transfer twenty-one percent of my inherited shares in Hart Group to his name.
He called it a sign of love and unity, a proof that I love him.
He sat across from me at the dinner table, and calmly told me that love meant sharing everything.
That a real partnership meant a shared future.
That if I truly believed in us, this was how I would prove it.” So, “I signed the papers without thinking” “I never showed you the papers.
He told me not to.
He said it wasn’t the right time.
He promised he would tell you himself.” I laugh bitterly.
“He told me you wouldn’t understand the sacrifices, we make about love,” I said.
“That you never really accepted him.
That the shares belonged to both of us, and that you’d find a way to undo it if you found out before we were married.” My grandmother said nothing.
“And I believed him,” I finished.
The words felt foolish in my mouth.
“I believed him over you.
My own grandmother.
I’m sorry.” She let go of my hands and placed both palms against my cheeks, wiping away my tears the same way she had when I was little.
But this wasn’t a scraped knee or a bad dream, a disappointment.
Now I was crying over a mistake I had made out of love.
“Look at me,” she said.
I looked at her.
Her eyes weren’t angry.
She looked heartbroken.
She looked like a woman who had seen this coming and could never stop it.
“I never trusted that man, Isabella,” she said quietly.
“Not from the first day you brought him here.” She paused.
“He smiled when he should smile.
He said all the right things.
But his eyes…” She shook her head.
“His eyes were always measuring things, Isabella.
Whatever he looked at, he was calculating its worth including you.” I pressed my lips together because she was right.
“I tried to find ways to show you,” she said.
“But you were happy.
And I wasn’t willing to ruin your happiness just because of the way I felt about him, no matter how sure I was.” Her thumbs moved to my cheeks and cleared my tears.
“That was my mistake, and I’ll fix it.” “It wasn’t your mistake.
It was mine.” “It was his.” Her voice turned hard.
My grandmother never raised her voice at me but I had just told her that I’d signed away part of everything she built, to a man who didn’t deserve it.
“Everything that happened in that apartment, the papers you signed, the friends you lost, the years you spent managing his moods and displeasing yourself so he wouldn’t frown, all of that was his doing.
He is a manipulative man, Isabella.
Nothing he did to you was an accident.” I let out a slow breath.
“The shares,” she said, pulling her hands back.
“Tell me what you remembered, the lawyer’s name.” “I don’t remember, Grandma.
The only thing I remembered was the name in the document.
Arado.
I don’t remember his last name.” She nodded, “And the date?” “Three years ago.
March fourteenth, I think.” Another nod.
“It will be challenged,” she said, her voice carrying the kind of certainty that comes from eighty years of running a company.
“Every line of those papers will be examined.
If he used pressure, manipulation, or lies to get your signature, and from what you’ve told me, he used all three, then those documents can be overturned.
It will take time.
But I promise you, Isabella.” Her eyes met mine.
“He will not keep what he took from you.” I believed her, not because I was desperate to correct my wrong or someone to believe me but because the Eleanor Hart that I grew up watching had never lost a fight.
And for the first time since I climbed out of that taxi with tears running down my face and my heart broken into pieces, I believed someone.
For the first time in a very long time, I felt safe.
I held her hand, and she held mine.
Finally, I breathed.
“Get some rest tonight,” she said.
“Tomorrow, we begin.” I nodded, squeezed her hand once, and stood up.
I had almost reached the door when I heard the notification sound.
She had set up an alert months ago for encrypted messages from her legal team, the kind that only went off for documents marked urgent.
“She had set that alert after I brought Matteo to the house, and I remember having a fight with her over it,” I remembered.
I turned back.
She had already picked up the tablet, already fixed back her glasses, her eyes moving across whatever had just arrived.
I watched her read.
I watched the color drain from her face.
Her fingers tightened around the tablet until her knuckles turned white.
Her eyes kept moving up and down the tablet and I just stood there.
“Grandma.” I rushed back to the bed in three steps.
“What is it?” She didn’t answer.
“Grandma!!.” I shouted.
My voice echoed through the room.
“What happened?” Slowly, she lowered the tablet onto her lap.
Then she looked at me and I knew that something had changed.
Something terrible had happened.
“Go back to your room, Isabella,” she said.
There was no room for questions.