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CHAPTER 110

Author: AMEDRIANNE STORIES
last update Last Updated: 2025-12-01 19:42:52

The week after the DA’s announcement unfolded with a surreal, gentle slowness, like convalescence. The world didn't change. The sun still rose, the coffee still brewed, the waves still crashed. But the quality of the air in our little house was different. Lighter. The silence between Arthur and I was no longer fraught with unsaid perils, but had returned to its old, comfortable nature—a shared space, not a minefield.

We were on the deck, a week after "the call," as we’d come to refer to it. Arthur was frowning at his moleskine, chewing on the end of his pen. I was attempting to sketch the gnarled cypress tree, my results looking less like Elena’s tortured masterpiece and more like a child’s drawing of a broccoli floret.

“The gardener did it with the fertilizer,” Arthur muttered, not looking up. “It’s too obvious. What if… what if it was the compost? More poetic. A metaphor for how the town’s secrets had been festering for years.”

I smirked, adding a particularly lopsided branch to my
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  • FORSAKEN WIFE, NOW A BILLIONAIRE'S GREATEST REGRET   CHAPTER 134

    The silence after hitting ‘send’ was louder than any sound. We stared at the screen, at the confirmation email that our dossier had winged its way into the encrypted inboxes of Apex Venture’s board members. The adrenaline that had fueled the all-nighter evaporated, leaving a hollow, jittery feeling.“Well,” Arthur said, rubbing his eyes. “We’ve either just committed career suicide for you and me, or we’ve thrown a grenade into the boardroom.”“A grenade made of pie charts and police reports,” I muttered, my stomach churning.Lanc poured four fingers of whiskey into a coffee mug. “To crazy bastards.”We drank. It burned.The wait was agonizing. Pryce’s injunction hearing came and went. The judge, swayed by the public sentiment and the “pending historical review,” denied the immediate injunction but set a tight deadline for the archaeological survey. It was a punt, not a victory. Pryce’s lawyers left the courtroom looking sour. He didn’t look at us.Life on the surface went on. Lanc’s c

  • FORSAKEN WIFE, NOW A BILLIONAIRE'S GREATEST REGRET   CHAPTER 133

    The letter proposing a joint-funded archaeological survey was a work of art. Arthur drafted it, I polished the prose, and Lanc signed it with a flourish that nearly tore the paper. We sent it to Pryce, the county, and, crucially, to the same local reporter who’d broken the “history halts harmony” story.The response was not a letter. It was a visit.Two days later, as I was elbow-deep in flour for a new batch of “strategic morale” pies (apple-ginger, this time), a black town car purred to a stop outside. Carson Pryce emerged, alone. He didn’t come to the door. He stood in my driveway, looking at the house with the detached interest of a geologist surveying a rock formation.I wiped my hands on my apron, heart hammering, and walked out onto the porch. “Mr. Pryce. To what do I owe the… surprise?”He turned his cool gaze on me. “A conversation. One that doesn’t require an audience, a grizzled archaeologist, or a homemade pastry.”“The pies are a side effect, not a requirement,” I said, l

  • FORSAKEN WIFE, NOW A BILLIONAIRE'S GREATEST REGRET   CHAPTER 132

    The letter proposing a joint-funded archaeological survey was a work of art. Arthur drafted it, I polished the prose, and Lanc signed it with a flourish that nearly tore the paper. We sent it to Pryce, the county, and, crucially, to the same local reporter who’d broken the “history halts harmony” story.The response was not a letter. It was a visit.Two days later, as I was elbow-deep in flour for a new batch of “strategic morale” pies (apple-ginger, this time), a black town car purred to a stop outside. Carson Pryce emerged, alone. He didn’t come to the door. He stood in my driveway, looking at the house with the detached interest of a geologist surveying a rock formation.I wiped my hands on my apron, heart hammering, and walked out onto the porch. “Mr. Pryce. To what do I owe the… surprise?”He turned his cool gaze on me. “A conversation. One that doesn’t require an audience, a grizzled archaeologist, or a homemade pastry.”“The pies are a side effect, not a requirement,” I said, l

  • FORSAKEN WIFE, NOW A BILLIONAIRE'S GREATEST REGRET   CHAPTER 131

    The sixty-day reprieve settled over us like a layer of fine, radioactive dust. It wasn’t peace; it was a tense, ticking quiet. Miranda became a woman possessed, her lab a fortress of core samples and seismic maps. We funded her extra lab assistant with a clandestine bake sale so epic it should have its own documentary.Lanc, meanwhile, worked double-time. With his own site finally moving, he raced against the shadow of Pryce’s postponed behemoth. “I need to have roofs on, windows in, before his planning commission hearing,” he grumbled one afternoon, hunched over blueprints at our table. “Make mine a fait accompli. You can’t contextually dwarf what’s already standing.”“He can if he buys the families out from under you before they move in,” Arthur said, not looking up from his laptop where he was composing letters to every state-level environmental agency he could find.“Cheerful,” Lanc shot back, rubbing his eyes. “Always so cheerful.”The first sign that Pryce was using his sixty da

  • FORSAKEN WIFE, NOW A BILLIONAIRE'S GREATEST REGRET   CHAPTER 130

    The reprieve was a fragile, glassy thing. For a week, the world held its breath. No new complaints materialized. LJ’s school record was quietly cleared, the “tip” officially deemed “unreliable.” Lanc’s crew poured the first foundations, the concrete setting into something permanent. We moved through our days with the wary grace of bomb disposal experts, waiting for a click that didn’t come.The silence from Apex was the most unnerving part. Arthur, ever the diagnostician, called it “the pathology of strategic patience.”“He’s recalibrating,” he said one evening as we washed dishes, our rhythm a familiar, comforting dance. “We forced him to abandon a set of tools. He’s now designing new ones. Probably quieter. More elegant.”“I miss the loud tools,” I grumbled, scrubbing a pie plate with more force than necessary. “At least you could see them coming.”The new tool arrived not with a bang, but with a glossy, full-color brochure. It was slipped under Clara’s door, left on windshields in

  • FORSAKEN WIFE, NOW A BILLIONAIRE'S GREATEST REGRET   CHAPTER 129

    The confrontation required a stage. We couldn't go to his rented cliffside mansion; that was his territory. The school was a warzone. Our homes were sanctuaries, now violated. So Arthur proposed neutral ground: the back room of The Salty Dog, the oldest, most stubbornly un-renovated pub on the coast. It smelled of decades of beer, fried fish, and unvarnished truth. Old Bob, the owner, owed Lanc for fixing his roof after a storm twenty years ago. He asked no questions, just handed Arthur the key.The room was a time capsule of wood paneling and faded nautical charts. We arrived early. Tanya, a wisp of a girl with bitten nails and enormous, frightened eyes, sat between Chloe and me, sipping a Coke like it was lifeline. Arthur and Lanc stood by the foggy window, a study in contrasts: Arthur, still and watchful; Lanc, a live wire of contained fury."He won't come," Lanc muttered, checking his watch for the tenth time."He'll come," Arthur said, his voice calm. "Curiosity is a lever. And h

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