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CHAPTER SIX

Author: Black Willows
last update Petsa ng paglalathala: 2026-02-02 10:22:54
{Ava's POV}

Adrian covered the distance between us in three long strides and grabbed my wrist before I had even fully processed that he was moving.

"What did you just say?" His voice was low and tight, the kind of quiet that was somehow louder than shouting.

I wrenched my wrist free and signed again, slower this time, making sure every word was unmistakable.

“I want a divorce.”

His face flushed a deep, ugly red. "A divorce." He spat out the word. "You have the nerve — the absolute nerve — to st
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  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

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    Adrian's POVI fired an intern's draft back to him three separate times over a formatting inconsistency that would have taken me thirty seconds to fix myself, and only realized how disproportionate my reaction had been when Grady quietly closed my office door on his way out, the kind of gesture that meant — everyone on this floor currently thinks you're impossible to work with today.He wasn't wrong. It had been impossible for four days running, ever since a sheet of paper with two names on it had gone into my desk drawer and stayed there, unresolved, sitting like a live wire I kept circling without ever once touching.I threw myself at the Hendricks close instead, at three other deals that didn't strictly need my direct attention, at a due diligence file from the Chicago team that I read cover to cover twice purely because reading it meant I didn't have to think about anything else. Work had always been the one place my discipline never failed me. It failed me considerably less well

  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

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  • The Muted Wife’s Return   CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

    Ava's POVNora was down for the night, Marta gone home an hour ago, and I sat on my own couch with a glass of wine I'd poured and mostly forgotten about, the Meridian Holdings discovery still turning over in my head like a stone I couldn't stop worrying with my thumb.I picked up my phone twice to call Sophie, to run the shell-company thread one more time before I let myself sleep on it, and put it down both times, because Sophie had already gone home to her own life, and this particular itch didn't actually need solving tonight. It needed something else. I sat with that realization a moment before I let myself admit what the something else was.I called Ryan.He answered on the second ring, no urgency in his voice, which told me he hadn't assumed a crisis the way he usually did lately when my name came up on his screen after nine at night. "Hey. Everything okay?":Everything's fine. I typed, since a video call felt like too much and a voice call meant Sophie's voice standing in for m

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    {Ava's POV}I stared at the message I had just sent and listened to my heart pound.Mr. Harold Bennett had been my father's closest friend and business partner for nearly two decades — the kind of man who had been a fixture at our dinner table when my mother was still alive, who had always spoken to

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    {Ava's POV}I watched Adrian step out of the room to take his call and felt my shoulders sink under the weight of something I was too tired to name. The nerve of him — walking in here with that blank, impenetrable expression, as though I was the one who had done something wrong. As though I was the

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    {Adrian's POV}Guilt was not an emotion I was particularly familiar with. I had spent most of my adult life making decisions with clarity and conviction, and I rarely looked back at them long enough to second-guess myself. But for the past several hours, it had been sitting in the center of my ches

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    Ava’s POVI had no idea how long I had been unconscious.The last thing I remembered was the doctors barking instructions at each other across the room, Mrs. Chen frantically trying to reach Adrian on the phone while the call went straight to voicemail, and me trying too — several times, my fingers

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