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CHAPTER 39

Author: AMEDRIANNE STORIES
last update Last Updated: 2025-10-14 22:57:01

The silence after the door clicked shut was a physical presence, thick and suffocating. It was the sound of a world ending. Arthur’s arms came around me, but I was a statue, carved from grief and shock. I couldn’t feel his touch. I could only feel the ghost of LJ’s small, desperate hands clinging to my waist.

“Gwen,” Arthur whispered, his voice raw. “I’m so sorry. We’ll fight this. We’ll appeal…”

The words were meaningless noise. I had seen the finality in the social worker’s eyes, the cold efficiency of the system. An appeal would take months, years. By then, LJ would be someone else’s son. He would be taught to call that weeping, purchased grandmother “Mom.” He would forget the smell of clay and the sound of my voice. He would forget me.

I pulled away from Arthur, my movements robotic. I walked out of the office, through the main hall of the foundation. The volunteers had stopped cleaning. They stood in silent, horrified clusters, having witnessed the culmination of the tragedy. I d
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  • 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

  • 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

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