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CHAPTER 16: PIECES
publish date:
2026-04-27 21:07:51
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THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 16: PIECES
My mother knew before I ever told Sebastian I was carrying his child, someone had already handed her a reason to let him go. I didn’t sleep that night.I just lay there on my back in the dark, staring at the ceiling, letting the truth settle over me. No fighting it, no trying to organize it into neat little boxes, just letting it land. My mother, a forged document, a man who had decided how everyone else’s story would end before they even realized they were part of the game.She was gone. Two years now, whatever she had thought, whatever reasons she had given herself for staying quiet, whatever love had kept her from speaking up until the very end, that had all disappeared with her. I would never get to ask her why. I would never hear her voice explaining it. All I had left was the outline of what had been done to her, the ache of knowing she had loved me deeply and still chosen silence, and the sad realization that love and wisdom were never quite the same thing.Victor Hale hadn’t
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 15: WHAT VICTOR BUILT
There it was, the lie that ended everything, and whoever sent it clearly wanted me to know it had always been a lie.I sat there staring at the screen until my eyes started to burn. The document was scarily good. The letterhead looked perfect, the numbers lined up exactly right, and the date stamp sat in just the right spot. If someone you trusted had handed this to you and said “look,” you would’ve believed every word, because it was built that way.But it had my name on it, and I’ve signed my name ten thousand times in my life. The loop on the second letter was off, just a little. The tail on the last letter curved to the right, mine always swept left, without even thinking about it. The pressure in the middle strokes was too steady and careful like someone had studied my signature once and tried really hard to copy it instead of just writing it the way you do when it’s yours.Three tiny mistakes. Small enough that almost nobody would notice, I was noticing. I forwarded the whole t
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 14: THE THURSDAY
Sebastian had been on the phone saying my name the night before he married someone else. I drove home from that lunch and sat in my car for twenty minutes before I trusted myself to go upstairs.I didn't cry, not because I was holding it together, but because what moved through me in that car park… hands in my lap, engine off, the afternoon going on outside the windscreen without me wasn't the kind of thing that became tears. It was slower than that, heavier. The particular sensation of a story you have lived inside for sixteen years beginning to change shape underneath you, and there being absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.He had been saying my name at 3am. I had built everything on what I knew. The engagement announcement on a Thursday morning and the silence that followed. One phone call, his voice careful and low, my name in his mouth, and then the click of the line going dead because I had hung up before he could say anything else. I had made that story clean and final
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 13: THE OTHER SIDE
Sebastian's wife wanted to talk, and the terrifying part was that she sounded like someone who was on my side.I said yes, not immediately. I sat with the phone against my ear long enough that she could hear me deciding… not hesitating, actually deciding, and then I said yes because I had spent sixteen years working with an incomplete version of events and the incompleteness had started to cost me more than the truth ever could.We met at a restaurant she suggested. Quiet, midweek, the kind of place designed for conversations that needed to stay where they were put. I arrived first deliberately, ordered water I wouldn't drink, and was already seated and composed when she walked in.I had seen her in photographs, society pages. The wedding announcement I had found on a Thursday morning that had quietly ended my world. I thought I understood what I was walking into.I was not entirely right. Claire Sutton-Hale moved through the restaurant with the practiced ease of a woman who had been
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 12: DARK PROVISION
Marcus left me alone with it. He closed his laptop, said “take the document, call me when you're ready,” and walked out without asking a single question I wasn't prepared to answer. That was the thing about Marcus, he always knew the difference between a moment that needed talking through and one that needed to be survived quietly. He got it right every time.I spread the documents across my desk and read them slowly, then again. Then a third time, because the second time hadn't made it any easier to hold.Legitimate, fully funded, untouched from the day it was opened. Three pages of clean, expensive legal work sitting quietly in the financial system for sixteen years like something that had been patiently waiting.Certain it would eventually be found.Set up two months after Sebastian's wedding. Two months after I had walked away from that church and taken a bus to my mother's house and sat at her kitchen table saying “I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm completely fine,” while something inside
THE CEO's REGRET CHAPTER 11: THE ENVELOPE
Victor Hale had just tried to buy me out of the room the same way he bought his son a bride. The man had exactly one move, and he had just shown it to me.I want to go back twenty minutes.I had been heading for the lobby exit, folder under my arm, mind already on the drive back, when Victor appeared near the window seating. Silver-haired, unhurried. Phone in hand like he'd simply wandered over, like this was accidental.Victor Hale was never accidental. I sat down anyway because refusing to sit would have handed him something, and I wasn't giving this man anything he hadn't taken already.He opened with pleasantries. Compliments about my firm…measured, impersonal, the kind you gave someone you were about to insult. Then something about Sebastian having good taste dropped into the conversation with just enough weight to test whether it would land somewhere soft.It didn't. I kept my face pleasant and my spine straight and waited for the real thing. He reached into his jacket and slo
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