เข้าสู่ระบบHailey's POV The coffee was already made when I came out of my room.His cup already gone, his jacket already off the hook by the door, the penthouse already empty except for the sound of Gio eating breakfast with Susan down the hall.He'd made my cup without being asked.The way he always had. Before the contracts, before the hearing, before I'd spent weeks proving to him that I was exactly as terrified as he'd always suspected.I stood in the kitchen and looked at the cup for a long moment.Then I drank it and went to get my son ready for school.Christina's office was on the thirty-first floor of a building that smelled like carpet cleaner and expensive coffee and the particular anxiety of people with legal problems. I'd been here enough times in the last months that the receptionist knew my name and my order. That felt like the kind of detail I should find reassuring.I did not find it reassuring.Christina had the files open before I'd sat down. Three weeks to the re-evaluation
Hailey's POV I didn't sleep well.I got home from Christina's just after eleven, checked on Gio, asleep, one hand still curled around his teddy, stood in the doorway of his room for longer than necessary, and then went to bed and stared at the ceiling until past one.The ring was still on my finger.Maybe I'm jealous.I had said it quietly enough that I'd hoped it wouldn't stick. It had stuck. It followed me into sleep and was there when I woke up at six-fifteen to the sound of Gio asking Susan for cereal, and it sat with me through the morning and the board calls and the three hours of document review that should have required my full attention and received approximately forty percent of it.The other sixty percent was doing the thing I'd told myself I'd stopped doing.Tracking Maxwell.Not deliberately. Just, noticing. The way you notice weather. He'd been in early, which I knew because his coffee cup was already in the kitchen when I came out at seven. He'd had back-to-back calls
Hailey's POV I should have gone home at seven.That was when Susan texted saying Gio had eaten dinner and was asking for me, when the rational part of my brain, the part that still functioned like a person rather than a woman slowly being hollowed out from the inside, said close the laptop, get in the car, go home to your son.Instead I'd ordered coffee, opened three more files, and told myself the Singapore expansion projections wouldn't review themselves.That was the lie I was living in now. Work as anaesthetic. Work as the thing I could still do correctly when everything else had become unrecognisable.The office was mostly empty by nine. The floor settled into its nighttime version, cleaning crew on the lower levels, the hum of the building's ventilation, the city blazing indifferently through forty floors of glass. I worked in the silence and told myself I preferred it.I was cross-referencing market analysis when I saw the light.Maxwell's office was at the opposite end of the
Kimberley's POV Tiana chose the restaurant.It was a sleek, overpriced place in Midtown with a dress code and a waiting list and the kind of lighting that made everyone look like they had something to hide. I arrived five minutes early, I always arrived early, it was how you controlled a room before anyone else entered it, and ordered still water and watched the door.She came in at twelve-ten. Tall, assured, Floyd's bone structure softened slightly into a feminine version of the same face. She scanned the room and found me immediately, and something in her expression settled, like she'd been expecting someone worth talking to and was relieved to find it confirmed."Kim." She sat down, dropped her bag, signalled the waiter in one fluid motion. "I almost cancelled. I wasn't sure..." A pause. "I didn't know how much Floyd had told you.""He said enough," I said.She looked at me for a moment. Then she smiled."Good," she said. "Then we can skip the part where we pretend we're just havi
Kimberley POVI made his favourite breakfast.That was how far I had fallen, sitting at the head of a dining table that seated twelve, in a house with seven bedrooms and a kitchen larger than most people's entire apartments, watching the chef I'd dismissed early because I wanted to do this myself. Standing at that stove at seven in the morning because it was the only language Floyd seemed to understand anymore. Proof that I was still here, still trying, still the woman he'd waited for.He didn't come down from the bedroom.I turned the heat down and waited.We'd been married for years now. People still called us a love story, I'd seen the articles, the comment sections, the women who typed goals under our engagement photos. The man who waited for his first love. The woman who finally came home. It had been the kind of story that wrote itself, and for a while, I had believed we were living it.Then his son had spent one night under our roof and everything had quietly shifted.Floyd app
Hailey's POV Christina showed up at nine with two coffees and the expression she wore when she had bad news she intended to deliver like good news.I let her in without a word.She took one look at my face, set both cups on the kitchen counter, and opened her arms. I walked into the hug and stayed there for a moment, just long enough to remember that I was still a person and not just a collection of things going wrong."How's Gio?""He's asleep." I pulled back, wrapped both hands around the coffee she'd brought. "Finally. He woke up twice last night. Kept coming to check that Maxwell was still here."Christina's expression did something complicated. She had the professional courtesy not to say what I knew she was thinking.We sat at the kitchen island. Outside, the city was doing its usual indifferent morning, traffic, grey sky, people with smaller problems than mine moving through their lives."Mason filed a motion yesterday evening," Christina said.I set down my coffee. "Of course







