Chapter 3

Alex ignored their protests and went inside.

The house was small, but it was clean and orderly. The worn wooden floors gleamed, and the air smelled of lemon polish and old books. He walked into his bedroom, which was sparse and functional. A simple bed, a desk, a bookshelf filled with texts on engineering and physics.

He opened the closet and pulled out the same duffel bag he had arrived with. He put in a few changes of simple, practical clothes-jeans, t-shirts, a plain gray hoodie. He didn' t own much else. He had billions in the bank, but he had never seen the point in surrounding himself with things he didn' t need. Everything of value to him was right here, in this house, in his memories.

When he came back out, a woman from next door was standing on his porch. Brenda, a kind, middle-aged woman with a warm smile, had known him since he was a boy. She was holding a small basket.

"Alex, honey," she said, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "I saw the fancy cars. Are you leaving already?"

Her gaze flickered to the Davies family, who were standing stiffly by their cars, refusing to come any closer to the "shack."

"For a little while," Alex said, his voice softening for the first time that day.

"Well, I picked these for you," Brenda said, holding out the basket. It was filled with ripe, golden loquats from the tree in her yard. "You always loved them. A little something for the road."

"Thank you, Brenda," Alex said, taking the basket. The simple, genuine gesture of kindness was a stark contrast to the cold, transactional nature of his biological family. This was community. This was care.

"You take care of yourself, you hear?" she said, patting his arm. "Don' t you let anyone push you around." Her eyes shot another meaningful look toward the Bentley.

"I won' t," he promised.

He walked down the path, carrying his worn duffel bag in one hand and the small basket of fruit in the other. The Davies family watched his exchange with Brenda with expressions of utter bewilderment.

His background was a mystery they couldn' t comprehend. He was an orphan, abandoned as a baby on the steps of a city hospital. The police had given him a name, Alex Stone, and sent him to an orphanage. He was a quiet, withdrawn child, too smart for his own good, always taking things apart to see how they worked.

He was six when Grandpa Joe, a widower with no children of his own, adopted him. Joe was a mechanic. He wasn' t rich, but he was kind and patient. He saw the boy' s brilliant mind and nurtured it. He taught Alex how to fix engines, how to weld, how to see the logic in a system of gears and wires. He taught him the value of hard work, integrity, and self-reliance.

When Grandpa Joe died, he left Alex the small house and the garage, everything he had in the world. Alex was eighteen. He put himself through college, studying engineering and computer science. It was during that time he discovered his real talent.

He could see patterns. Not in a mystical way, but in a way that was intensely logical. He could look at a complex system-a stock market, a traffic grid, a corporate structure-and see the flaws, the points of stress, the inevitable outcomes. It was an extreme form of analytical thinking, a skill honed by years of diagnosing broken machinery. He didn' t predict the future; he calculated it.

He used that skill to make his first million in the stock market, then tens of millions. He founded Stone Dynamics, a tech company that specialized in predictive analytics and system optimization. He became a billionaire before he was thirty, a ghost in the machine of global finance, his name known only in the highest circles as the mysterious "Mr. Stone."

But he never left this small house behind. It was his anchor, his touchstone. It was the only real home he had ever known.

As he reached the cars, his mother, Catherine, looked at the basket of fruit in his hand with disdain.

"What is that?" she asked.

"Loquats," Alex said. "A gift from my neighbor."

"You can' t possibly be thinking of bringing those... things... with us," Sarah chimed in, wrinkling her nose.

Alex just looked at her, then deliberately opened the back door of the Bentley and placed his duffel bag and the basket of fruit on the pristine leather seat. The simple act was a declaration. He was not going to erase his past to suit them. He was not ashamed of where he came from.

The Davies family looked on, their faces a mixture of frustration and disgust. They had come to collect a long-lost son, an asset. Instead, they had found a person, one who refused to fit into the box they had built for him.