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22. The Wife

last update publish date: 2026-06-24 20:12:13

Claire's POV

The charity gala was only a few weeks away and it felt as though the entire company had gone into panic mode.

By Monday morning emails were piling up faster than I could answer them and people kept stopping by my office with new questions, new requests and new problems that needed attention.

As usual most of it eventually landed on my desk.

I sat at the conference table surrounded by contracts, schedules, guest lists, seating plans and more coffee than any one person should probabl
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  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   82. Telling her more

    Claire's POVThe moment we reached the car, Damien opened the passenger door for me, but I didn't get inside immediately. I stood there with one hand resting lightly against the roof while I watched him walk around the front of the car.He looked different. He was still Damien, still composed, still wearing the expensive clothes that somehow always made him look as though he had stepped out of a business magazine but something about him had changed after hearing the baby's heartbeat or perhaps I was simply noticing something that had always been there.He had looked at that tiny flickering image on the screen as though someone had handed him the most important thing in his life.I smiled. "What?"He had stopped beside me. "You keep asking me that.""Because you keep looking at me like you're about to say something.""I was thinking.""That's dangerous."He laughed. "I was thinking about you."I raised an eyebrow. "Also dangerous."He shook his head. "You're impossible.""And yet you m

  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   81. The Second Ultrasound

    Claire's POVBy the time we reached the clinic, I had already checked the appointment details three times and not because I had forgotten them but because I was nervous.There was something strange about knowing that a tiny person was growing inside me while having so little memory of the beginning of it. Every time we came for an appointment, I felt as though I was being introduced to my own pregnancy all over again.Damien seemed to sense my uneasiness without me saying anything.He had been unusually quiet during the drive, but not distracted. His attention kept drifting toward me whenever we stopped at a traffic light, and every time I caught him looking, he would give me that small smile he had started giving me lately. The one that made something inside my chest flutter.When we entered the clinic, the receptionist greeted us and checked us in before directing us toward the waiting area. I sat down and Damien sat beside me and for about thirty seconds, we were both quiet and the

  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   80. 80. A promise

    Claire's POV"Because I want to understand what we're becoming."Damien remained quiet after I said it. His eyes stayed on mine, and for once there was no immediate answer waiting behind them. I could see him thinking, perhaps trying to understand whether I was asking him to give me another version of our past or whether I was asking for something more complicated.I wasn't entirely sure myself. I only knew that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life treating my own marriage like a story someone else had told me. I wanted to know it and not the polished version and not the version that made Damien look like a perfect husband and me like a perfect wife.I wanted the ugly parts too. The ridiculous arguments, the misunderstandings, the days when we'd been irritated with each other and the nights when one of us had gone to bed angry because if all I remembered were the beautiful moments, I would never know whether what I was feeling now was real or simply nostalgia for a life I had be

  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   79. Repeating the same questions

    Claire's POVI woke the next morning with the sound of rain against the windows and for several seconds, I didn't move. I lay beneath the covers, staring at the ceiling while the previous night's memories moved through my mind in fragments. The song and the dancing and Damien's arms around me. His heartbeat beneath my cheek and the kiss and the words that had come afterward.I think I'm starting to understand why I still might.I turned onto my side and stared at the empty space beside me it wasn't my room that bothered me it was everything I couldn't remember about the room. I knew I had lived in this penthouse and I knew Damien and I had shared a life here and I knew I had loved him but I didn't know how we had gotten from two people entering a contract marriage to two people dancing together in this room.There were pieces everywhere. The problem was that they weren't connected. I remembered stealing his dessert and I remembered calling him my husband and I remembered laughing with

  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   78. Our first dance

    Claire's POV"I called you my husband." The words left my mouth, but for several seconds Damien didn't respond. He was still standing in front of me, his hand resting lightly at my waist, his other hand holding mine. The music continued playing around us, soft and steady, but neither of us seemed to hear it anymore.I could still see it, a different version of this room and a different dress and Damien laughing and me standing in front of him with my arms around his neck and the strange certainty that he belonged to me.My husband.I pressed my fingertips against my temple. "I said it."Damien's voice was barely above a whisper. "You remember saying it?""I remember how it felt."He swallowed. "What did it feel like?"I looked at him. "Normal."Something broke across his expression as I continued before I could lose the thought. "I wasn't thinking about whether I was supposed to love you. I wasn't wondering whether I should call you that. It was just..." I searched for the right word.

  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   77. The song

    Claire's POV The penthouse was unusually quiet that evening not empty. I had learned that Damien's penthouse was never truly empty. There was always the faint hum of the city beyond the windows, the distant movement of traffic several floors below, the quiet sounds of someone moving through another room. But tonight, there was no television playing, no phone conversation drifting from Damien's office, and no Maria in the kitchen making enough noise to remind us that dinner would eventually appear whether we were hungry or not. I was curled into the corner of the living-room sofa with a book resting open in my lap, although I had been staring at the same page for several minutes without absorbing a word. My mind had been doing that lately. Wandering and searching. Sometimes I wondered whether I was helping my memories return or simply thinking about them so much that I was creating memories that had never existed. That frightened me. The last thing I wanted was to give Damien som

  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   6. The Morning After

    Claire's POVDamien wasn't home, of course he wasn't.I stepped inside anyway, but the apartment felt different. Larger somehow. Colder. The silence seemed to stretch endlessly through the empty rooms, and for the first time since discovering I was pregnant, fear settled heavily in my chest. It wasn

  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   5. The Woman Who Left Him

    Claire's POVThe moment I saw the name on Damien's phone screen, something inside me went completely still.Tiffany Morgan.For a second, I wondered if I had imagined it. The restaurant seemed to fade around me, the soft glow of candlelight and the murmur of nearby conversations becoming distant an

  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   4. A Dinner for Two

    Claire's POVThe message remained open on my phone long after I had finished reading it.Outside the penthouse windows, Manhattan glittered beneath the deepening evening sky, its countless lights stretching toward the horizon like stars scattered across black velvet. Normally I loved this view. The

  • The Wife He Chose Too Late   3. The Wife in Everything But Name

    Claire's POVThe next morning, I left the penthouse before Damien not because I had an early meeting and not because my schedule demanded it but because I couldn't bear the thought of sitting across from him at breakfast while pretending his words from the night before hadn't lodged themselves bene

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