MasukShare
Chapter 10: Headlines
Tanggal publikasi:
2026-02-20 20:06:49The auction had been Sera's idea, which meant it ran exactly the way she wanted.
She had chaired the organizing committee for six weeks, quietly, through emails and one in-person meeting where she sat at the far end of the table and let the committee director think he was running things until the last twenty minutes. Then she restructured the entire budget in four decisions and smiled when he said it was a good idea.
The Harwick ballroom held three hundred guests. Eighteen auction lots. A dinner program she had timed to the minute, because programs that ran over made people restless and restless people bid less.
She had been here for two hours before the room filled.
She moved through it the way she moved through any room she had prepared for, which was without effort, because the effort had already happened. She knew which donors needed to feel personally seen before they would open their checkbooks. She knew which table had the difficult personality and who at that table handled him best. She knew the journalist from the city journal was going to try to catch her near the bar, which was why she positioned herself near the auction display instead.
"Ms. Montague." A woman in navy, sixties, significant donor, second pass at the display in twenty minutes. Sera had clocked her interest the first time.
"The Bellini piece is extraordinary," Sera said. "The foundation acquired it with your collection in mind, actually. I thought of you when we confirmed the lot."
The woman looked at her with the specific pleasure of someone realizing they had been noticed. "You know my collection?"
"I make it a point to know the people in this room." Sera smiled. "Enjoy the evening."
She moved on before it became a conversation. That was how these rooms worked. You gave people exactly what they needed and kept moving, because the moment you stopped, the room stopped moving with you.
The journalist found her anyway, near the podium at intermission. Young, prepared, the kind of energy that came from having a question ready and being proud of it.
"Ms. Montague, you've kept a very low profile until recently. Could you speak to your quiet years?"
Sera looked at him pleasantly. "I was learning," she said. "I find that's better done quietly." She tilted her head just slightly. "There's a more interesting story here tonight, though. Four hundred thousand in pre-pledges before the room even sat down for dinner. That's what I'd write."
He wrote it down. She moved away.
By eight-thirty the live bidding was open and Sera was at the podium running it the way she ran everything, calmly and with complete control, reading the room for hesitation, knowing when to slow down and when to push. The Bellini piece went at twice its reserve. She did not react, because reacting would have broken the moment, but she felt it settle warm in her chest the way things did when they went exactly as planned.
At intermission she stood near the window with a glass of water while Dante positioned himself a few feet away doing what he always did, which was watch the room without looking like he was watching it. She took her phone from her clutch and scrolled through the notifications.
Seven of them. A message from her father. Two from the committee director, thrilled and needing her to know it. Two news alerts. One from a number she did not have saved.
She opened the unfamiliar one.
Three words.
*You look well.*
No name. She did not need one.
She looked at it for the length of time it took to decide. Then she blocked the number, dropped the phone back into her clutch, picked up her champagne from the side table, and walked back into the room.
The second half of the auction ran cleaner than the first. It always did. The room had loosened by then, wine and momentum doing their work, and by the time the final lot closed the ballroom was warm and loud in exactly the right way, the kind of energy that meant people would be talking about the evening tomorrow.
Sera stepped down from the podium to applause she accepted with a brief nod and immediately redirected toward the committee. She shook hands, said the right things, kept moving. She was crossing toward the far side of the room when Dante fell into step at her shoulder.
He leaned down slightly. "He's here."
Sera did not turn around. She took a sip of her champagne and kept her eyes on the room in front of her. "I know," she said. "He's been here for twelve minutes."
A short pause. "He hasn't come over."
"He won't." Her voice was the same tone she used for everything in this room, even and unhurried. "Not yet. He's still deciding if he regrets it."
Dante was quiet for a moment. When he asked, he asked it the way he asked things he actually wanted to know. "And when he decides?"
Sera looked across the ballroom. The display wall. The Bellini piece with its red sold sticker. Three hundred people who had come here tonight because of work she had done and a name she had stopped hiding.
She lifted her glass slightly.
"He'll find out I've already moved on."
She said it cleanly, the way she said things she needed to be true, and walked forward into the room without looking back.
…
Bab terbaru
My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 89: She'll Think About It
Dante's text came at eight forty-seven on Wednesday night.*She'll think about it.*Roman read it at his desk in the study where he had been reading without fully reading for the past two hours. He read it once. He set the phone down. He picked it back up and read it again, which was not necessary because he had understood it the first time, but he read it again anyway.He put the phone in his pocket.He got up and went to the kitchen. He stood at the counter. He went back to the study and sat down.She'll think about it.Not no. He knew the difference clearly now, from months of learning how she communicated. She did not say yes when she meant maybe, and she did not say she would think about something as a way of closing a door. She would think about it. That was an honest statement of her current position.He could receive an honest statement of a current position.He sat for a moment longer. Then he picked up his phone and called Felix.Felix answered on the second ring. "Talk.""S
My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 88: The Ask
Roman called Dante on a Wednesday afternoon.He had been thinking about it since Monday. Since the two words arrived and he had put the phone in his pocket and gone back to work with the specific quality of someone who had received something that changed the shape of a day without requiring any immediate action. He had thought about it on Tuesday and had not called. He had thought about it again Wednesday morning and had waited until the afternoon, until the desk was clear and the Hartwell meeting was done and he had no practical reason to delay except making sure, one more time, that he was doing this the right way.He picked up the phone and called.Dante answered on the third ring. The neutral professional register he used for calls that had not yet established a category."I want to ask Sera to dinner," Roman said. No preamble. "One dinner. There is no agenda. No pressure. No assumptions about what it means or where it goes."A brief pause."Then ask her," Dante said."I'm asking
My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 87: I Know
She had saved his number on a Saturday morning and had not responded for two days.She had put the phone down after saving it and gone back to her coffee and the kitchen window and told herself she was not going to reply from the immediate place, the reactive place, the place where you received something significant and moved toward it before you understood whether you were moving from honesty or from the reflex of having been reached.Sunday passed. She went to the garden, called her father, and sat on the bench. She did not respond.She wrote the first response Sunday evening at the desk in the sitting room with the lamp on. Three sentences. She looked at them and deleted them. They explained too much. He had not asked for an explanation.The second response came Monday morning before leaving for the office. Two sentences. One of them was fully true, and one was not quite true, and she was not going to send something that was only partially honest. She deleted it.The third was a qu
My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 86: Unsaved
He sent it on a Saturday morning from his own phone. Not through Garrett. Not through Dante's number, which had become the channel for things that needed a third party between them. His own phone, his own number, which she would not have saved because he had never texted her directly from it. Not during the marriage, when they had lived together and had not needed to. Not after, when there had been nothing to say and then things that had been routed through proper channels that had held both of them at the correct distance. He had stepped outside the proper channels. He had written the message in the study and looked at it for six minutes and then sent it without changing a word. He put the phone on the desk and sat with what he had done. He did not know if she would save his number. He did not know if she would respond, or when, or what the response would be when it came. He had sent it anyway, which was the point, which had always been the point since the letter, since the gate
My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 85: What She Orders
The morning had nothing in it until ten.This was not an accident. Sera had started building these two months ago, not every week, but with enough regularity that they had become a real feature of her schedule rather than an oversight. She had not announced it to anyone. She had simply started doing it and found that the mornings she protected this way were different in quality from the ones she did not.She made her own coffee.Rosa was not yet in. The kitchen was quiet and entirely hers, the particular quality of an early morning in a house before anyone else arrived to inhabit it. She measured the coffee, waited while it ran, and poured it into the cup she had been using since she was twenty-two. The one she always reached for without deciding to.She took it to the sitting room.The flowers were on the small table beside the lamp. White ones. She had ordered them herself, from the shop in the city that had been in her notebook for years under the heading of things she meant to do.
My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 84: What Dante Sees
Dante had been watching Sera Montague for eleven years. He had watched her take the company from her father's hands without dropping a single thing. He had watched her organize a marriage around a man who was not paying attention and then leave it without making a scene. He had watched her go to Milan and come back with yellow flowers and something restored that had been quietly disappearing for three years. He was good at watching. It was the most useful thing he did. He had been watching Roman Ashford for considerably less time. The past year had provided sufficient material. He had watched Roman come to the estate gate on a Tuesday night in November and sit there for twenty-three minutes without once calling through to be let in. Dante had been at a different window than Sera when the headlights pulled away. He had noted the time. Not one phone call to the intercom. Not one request. Twenty-three minutes and then gone. He had watched Sera stand at her window for four minutes af
My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 25: The Secret Surfaces
Garrett arrived at nine with a folder he had not sent ahead.That was the first thing Roman noticed. Garrett sent documents in advance. Eleven years of working together, and the rule had never changed: a client should never be surprised in a meeting. The fact that he was carrying something Roman ha
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-21My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 20: Five Words
Roman told himself he was going to clear the air.That was the exact phrase he used in his own head as he watched Sera excuse herself from the chief of surgery and move toward the far end of the room. Clear the air. Practical. Reasonable. They were going to be in the same professional circles and i
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-20My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 21: Mr. Ashford
Isabella went to bed at eleven thirty.Roman said he would follow soon. He went to his study instead, removed his jacket, and sat in the chair he had been sitting in most nights since the divorce when there was something he could not set down. He left most of the lights off. Just the desk lamp, its
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-20My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret Chapter 17: Six Rings
Sera had been reading for twenty minutes when her phone lit up.Unknown number. She looked at it for one second. Then she set it face-up on the cushion beside her and went back to her page.She knew.She couldn't have explained how. The number was unsaved, clean, nothing her phone recognized. But s
Terakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-19
Anda juga akan menyukai
One night stand with a Billionaire
Pixiepiu779.1K DibacaHer Graceful War Song
Summer's Blaze930.4K DibacaThe Heiress' Return: Six Brothers at Her Beck and Call
Night Eleven530.6K DibacaA Dangerous Atrophy
Qi River's Old Stream781.2K DibacaThe Vault of Sin
B.S. Turaki137 DibacaWhere fear ends
Georgiana47 DibacaThe Billionaire’s Blood Proxy
RawJenny72 DibacaThe Billioner's Hidden Desires
Fay Izora 110 Dibaca
