Pustaka
Cari
Beranda / Romance / FORSAKEN WIFE, NOW A BILLIONAIRE'S GREATEST REGRET / CHAPTER 30

Share

CHAPTER 30

Penulis: AMEDRIANNE STORIES
last update Terakhir Diperbarui: 2025-10-04 22:50:02

The Malibu sun, so different from the city's hard light, felt accusatory. It illuminated the dust motes dancing in the sterile, staged perfection of the house, highlighting the emptiness. Lanc Jr., who I’d started calling LJ to separate him from the ghost of his father, was a quiet, watchful presence. He followed me from room to room, a small, silent shadow. He didn't cry. He didn't ask for his mother. His stoicism was more unsettling than any tantrum.

Three days after we arrived, the first shot was fired. Not from a gun, but from a process server.

A sleek car pulled into the driveway, and a man in a suit handed me a thick, legal envelope. "For Gwen Gonzalez, legal guardian of Lanc Arcony Jr."

Inside was a motion filed by a corporate entity called "Aethelred Holdings," challenging my fitness as a guardian and seeking immediate custody of the minor, Lanc Arcony Jr., citing my "documented instability, history of public hysterics, and direct, adversarial relationship with the child's pat
Lanjutkan membaca buku ini secara gratis
Pindai kode untuk mengunduh Aplikasi
Bab Terkunci
Bab sebelumnya Bab selanjutnya

Bab terbaru

  • 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 I’d sit at the dining table, surrounded by interview notes and pie recipes (which were, I insisted, vital historical documents), trying to stitch our voices into a chorus.Lanc showed up one rainy Tuesday, tracking mud and holding a cardboard tube.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

Bab Lainnya

Anda juga akan menyukai

Jelajahi dan baca novel bagus secara gratis
Akses gratis ke berbagai novel bagus di aplikasi GoodNovel. Unduh buku yang kamu suka dan baca di mana saja & kapan saja.
Baca buku gratis di Aplikasi
Pindai kode untuk membaca di Aplikasi
DMCA.com Protection Status