CHASING HIS EX-WIFE: My ex-husband wants me-too late

"You only have five months to live, Mrs. Moretti."The words landed softly, carefully spoken with the kind of gentleness reserved for delivering devastation, but they shattered the room all the same because there was no cushion strong enough to soften a truth like that. Jayda sat perfectly still on the edge of the hospital bed with her hands folded neatly in her lap, her spine straight as though posture alone could hold her together while the white walls pressed in too close, and the air turned too thin to breathe. For a moment she wondered if she had misheard him or if perhaps this was someone else's nightmare bleeding into her reality because five months could not possibly be meant for her, could not possibly be the remainder of a life she had barely begun to live.Across from her the doctor continued speaking—lungs, lymph nodes, aggressive progression, all the symptoms of cancer—but his voice blurred into meaningless sound that washed over her without penetration because her mind

Jayda signed the divorce papers at dawn.She sat at the kitchen table with a pen in her hand, the documents spread before her like accusations she couldn't refute, the house silent except for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway that seemed louder than it had any right to be. Her hand didn't shake when she pressed the pen to paper because she had used up all her tears the night before, cried until her eyes burned, until her throat felt raw, until there was nothing left inside her except a hollow ache that wouldn't go away no matter how many times she told herself this was for the best.The signature looked strange on the page, her name reduced to ink on a legal document that would erase four years of her life as though they had never mattered at all.She stared at it for a long moment before gathering the papers together, tapping them against the table to align the edges with a precision that felt almost mechanical because if she focused on small details she didn't have

Silence stretched across the line for so long Jayda wondered if the call had dropped, if Lucas had hung up on her, if she'd just made a fool of herself by thinking she could simply walk back into a world she'd abandoned three years ago.Then Lucas exhaled slowly, the sound crackling through the speaker like static. "You want to race again," he repeated, his voice flat like he was testing the words to see if they made sense. "After three years, after walking away, after marrying that billionaire and disappearing from the circuit completely, you want to just come back like nothing happened?"Jayda swallowed hard against the tightness in her throat. "Yes.""Why now?" The question came sharp, direct, cutting through whatever excuse she might have prepared. "What changed?"She thought about the hospital, about the doctor's careful voice delivering her death sentence, about Antonio handing her divorce papers on what was supposed to be their anniversary. "Everything changed," she said quietl

Jayda caught the keys, walked around to the driver's side, pulled open the door. She paused before climbing in, reached for the racing helmet she'd brought from the mansion, the one piece of her old life she'd refused to leave behind.The helmet felt right in her hands as she pulled it on, the familiar weight settling over her head, the world narrowing to what she could see through the visor. She slid into the driver's seat, her body remembering the position even if her muscles protested the angles, her hands finding the wheel like they'd never left.The moment her fingers wrapped around the leather something shifted inside her, something that had been dormant for three years suddenly waking up and stretching and remembering what it felt like to be alive.She turned the key.The engine roared to life, vibrations running through her body, the sound filling her ears in ways that made her chest ache with how much she'd missed this. She closed her eyes for just a second, let herself feel

The next two weeks blurred together in a haze of pain, exhaustion, and small improvements that felt both monumental and insignificant.Week one was agony.Every morning she dragged herself to the track at six, every morning Lucas pushed her past where she thought she could go, every morning she discovered new ways her body could hurt. Running got slightly easier—she could do three laps now without stopping, though her breathing was still labored and her chest still felt too tight. Push-ups improved from five to twenty, though her arms shook the entire time. Planks went from thirty seconds to a full minute, though by the end she was trembling so hard Lucas had to tell her to stop.The coughing got worse.Not every day, but often enough that she started carrying tissues with her, started turning away from Lucas whenever she felt the tickle in her throat that signaled another attack. Sometimes there was blood, sometimes there wasn't, she couldn't predict which made it worse somehow, made