Semua Bab When love turns to ashes : Bab 111 - Bab 117

Aren’t you going to see me off to my hotel, huh?” Xander teased, voice light as he stood in the doorway.June blinked, cheeks flushing an answering color. “Then who will bring me back?” she shot back, half-smiling.“Driver,” Xander said with a mock bow. “But I’ll pick you up tomorrow.”They rode back through a city bathed in sodium light and quieter than the day, the car a small warm tomb of normalcy. At the hotel entrance, they paused under the awning as cool air brushed them; June adjusted her bag, more composed than she felt. “Go inside, June. Get some rest,” Xander said, trying to sound casual.“Please,” he added softly when she turned to leave, the single-syllable pleading that had crept into his voice since he found Valerie again. It wasn’t only for himself—he wanted, in whatever little time he had, to make one evening memory that was simple and unarguably theirs.June surprised herself by nodding. She had told herself she would be strict, pragmatic; she had told herself she wou

Dr. Lawrence gave him a few final instructions no jewelry, remove dentures, fasten the wristband and the anesthesiologist came in to talk about induction, what the drugs would feel like, for how long he might remember the beginning and then fade. Xander listened, nodding. He answered the nurse’s checklist and signed forms with a steady hand. Everything about him had taken on a painfully quiet decisiveness.Before they wheeled him away, Mr. Collins’ assistant, discreet and efficient, arrived with two envelopes in hand. Xander had requested these be brought to the ward the morning of the operation. He opened one and read it quickly the final will, the legal instructions putting Valerie in trust until she came of age. He signed with one flourish and placed the document back into the envelope, eyes bright. He glanced at the other envelope, smaller, his personal letters to June and Valerie. He smoothed the paper as if it were fragile. He had written them in the quiet that had come after

“I’m so sorry,” the nurse said. “There will be an opportunity for family viewing after the mortuary processes. I can arrange it at the earliest possible time, but right now”“You’re keeping him from me,” June said, and in a voice that was suddenly small and raw she let the grief flood. “You’re keeping the only man who could have told me why from me. You took away my chance to say anything before the body was claimed, before the world pronounced him dead.”They would not let her see him. She banged her fist on the counter until a fresh pain bit through the wail of rage. “What do I tell my child?” she demanded. “When she wakes and asks, Where’s my dad? What am I supposed to say? That he’s a miracle donor? That a stranger saved you? Tell mehow do I explain to a child that the man who gave her life is gone and that he lied to me about it and he”. The questions were a ragged thing that had no clean end.Dr. Lawrence had followed her into the hall and now placed a hand on her shoulder, an

In the months that followed the hospital’s quiet frenzy, the hard, slow work of putting life back together began in earnest. The legal papers Xander had left the will, the trust documents, the pointed notes in his own hand — proved to be the hinge that opened doors June had long thought sealed. Mr. Collins and a handful of honest lawyers moved quickly on her behalf: they used the documentation Xander had prepared, the forensic accounting that exposed irregularities around Lionel and Damian’s takeover, and testimony that tied the wrongful transfers to coercion and fraud. In court, where years of noise and rumor finally met paper and sworn statements, the judges dismantled much of what had been stolen.It was not a clean or easy victory. There were long depositions, late-night meetings, and the steady grind of undoing corporate artifice. Damian fought; Lionel made excuses. But the story Xander had left his last-minute reconciliations, the letters, the trust arrangements that named Valer