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CHAPTER 29

ผู้เขียน: AMEDRIANNE STORIES
last update ปรับปรุงล่าสุด: 2025-10-03 22:30:28

The Malibu police station was a jarring blend of sterile bureaucracy and surfer-town casual. The air smelled of stale coffee and salt spray. A social worker with tired eyes led me to a small, windowless room.

He was sitting in a chair that was too big for him, his legs dangling, not touching the floor. Lanc Arcony Jr. He had his father's dark, intense eyes, but they were wide with a shell-shocked fear that was entirely his own. He clutched a battered Game Boy like a lifeline.

"Lanc?" I said softly, kneeling in front of him so we were at eye level. "My name is Gwen."

He looked at me, and a flicker of recognition crossed his face. "You're the lady from the pictures," he whispered. "The one Mommy didn't like."

The blunt honesty of a child was a punch to the gut. "I knew your mommy. And I knew your dad."

"My dad's in heaven," he stated, parroting a line he'd clearly been told. "Mommy said he was sick. She said you made him sicker."

Another blow. I took a steadying breath. "People are comp
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goodnovel comment avatar
ladonnaallen
So weird. Why would she?
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  • FORSAKEN WIFE, NOW A BILLIONAIRE'S GREATEST REGRET   CHAPTER 136

    The manuscript grew like a defiant, unruly garden in the middle of our living room. Pages migrated from the desk to the sofa, the coffee table, the floor. It was a chaos of our own making, and it felt more like home than anything had in months.We’d settled into a rhythm. Mornings, Arthur would disappear into his study to wrestle with the chronology of permits and legal filings, muttering about “narrative causality versus bureaucratic reality.” I’d sit at the dining table, surrounded by interview notes and pie recipes (which were, I insisted, vital historical documents), trying to stitch our voices into a chorus.Lanc showed up one rainy Tuesday, tracking mud and holding a cardboard tube. “Blueprints,” he announced, unrolling them with a flourish over my carefully sorted pages. “For the record. So people know what we were actually building, not the glass coffin he wanted to put it in.”I smoothed a corner of the blueprint, my fingers tracing the lines of a family home, the thoughtful

  • FORSAKEN WIFE, NOW A BILLIONAIRE'S GREATEST REGRET   CHAPTER 135

    The victory felt like a phantom limb. We could sense its absence, a strange, weightless space where the constant pressure of Pryce had been. Lanc’s site buzzed with unimpeded activity. Clara’s school board meetings returned to mundane debates about textbooks. The town exhaled, the collective tension dissipating into the salt air.We should have been celebrating. Instead, we were listless.A week after the announcement, we gathered on my porch for what Arthur called “the first meeting of the peacetime cabinet.” The sunset was a spectacular blaze of orange and purple, but it felt like a screen saver.Lanc took a long pull from his beer. “I got a call from the county today. All permits cleared. No more surprises. It was… anti-climactic.”“You wanted a parade?” Chloe asked, kicking her feet up on the railing. “A marching band playing ‘We Are the Champions’ as you install the toilets?”“I wanted to feel like we beat him,” Lanc admitted, his voice quieter than usual. “Not like he got bored

  • 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

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