All Chapters of He Chose my Cousin, so I Chose Revenge: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

Our drinks arrived a few minutes later. The young woman set them down gently, then walked away without needing to say anything. There was something restful about the way people moved in here. Like they had nothing to prove.Julian took a slow sip of his coffee. I wrapped both hands around my tea and just held it for a while. The warmth of the cup against my palms grounded me more than I expected. Outside, a couple passed by with their shoulders drawn close, sharing a single umbrella. The moment felt small, but real. I had come to cherish those moments. Not because they were rare, but because I had finally begun to notice them.“I don’t regret leaving,” I said.Julian did not interrupt.“I thought it would feel like abandoning something. But it didn’t. It feels more like… honoring it by letting it change.”He looked around the space. “They kept the light fixtures.”I nodded. “One of them is still crooked. We never did fix it.”He smiled and leaned back, resting his arm on the back of t

It started quietly, like most things do these days. No announcement. No scandal. Just a name mentioned over coffee, a folded page in a trade magazine, a whispered remark from someone I used to know well but hadn’t spoken to in years. I almost missed it. Would’ve missed it, if Simone hadn’t paused mid-sentence and tilted the page toward me, her finger tapping once, deliberate.“You’ll want to look at this,” she said.I did not expect to see the silhouette of my own work staring back at me. Not exactly, not down to the last detail, but close enough that I knew. A particular sleeve curve I had only used once, a way the fabric twisted at the hip that had taken me four sketchbook tries to solve. Not copied, not blatantly. But echoed. Whispered through another label, bent just enough to avoid accusation, but not enough to hide the truth from someone who had lived it.Julian sat across from me, his fork suspended halfway to his plate. I hadn’t even noticed the conversation had stopped.“What

It started with a drawer I hadn’t opened in months. One of the narrow ones in the back corner of my desk, the kind that collects scraps you promise to deal with later but never do. I had been looking for a spare needle, something small and practical, when my fingers brushed against the edge of a thick envelope. Not new. The paper was soft from time, creased at the corners. I knew what it was before I pulled it out.The handwriting on the front was mine.There were more inside the drawer. Seven in total. All addressed to no one, folded carefully, stored without any intention of ever being sent. Letters written during the quiet days, back when I still signed my name Noelle. When I lived like a ghost inside someone else’s skin.I carried them to the couch and sat with my legs tucked beneath me. The light was thin and gray through the window. It felt like the right kind of afternoon to remember who I had been.The first letter was dated two months after I had left everything behind. It wa

I asked to meet in a place that didn’t carry memory. Neutral, clean, and quiet. A bookstore café tucked between two buildings in a part of the city that hadn’t changed much in twenty years. The kind of place where no one rushed and no one leaned too far in. Julian walked me there but stayed outside when I went in. He knew I needed to do this myself.She was already seated when I arrived.She had chosen the back corner. Her coat was folded neatly over the chair beside her. No makeup, no jewelry. She looked younger than I expected, and older too, in that way people sometimes do when they’ve spent years proving they mattered and not quite believing it.“I’m not recording anything,” I said gently as I sat down. “And I’m not here to ask you to fix anything.”“I know,” she said.We sat for a minute without speaking. The clink of cups behind the counter filled the space between us. She sipped her drink slowly and then looked up.“I worked for Alessia for almost two years,” she said. “Right a

The morning after my meeting with the whistleblower, I woke earlier than usual. Not in the jolted, restless way that used to pull me out of sleep in the middle of bad seasons, but in a slow and deliberate way, as if my mind had decided I needed a head start. The room was still dim, the curtains only letting in a thin line of pale light. Julian was still asleep, one arm thrown over my side, breathing steady. I stayed there for a while, staring at the ceiling and thinking about her. The way she had walked into that little back room where we met, shoulders squared but hands twisting in her lap. The way her voice had trembled in the first minutes before settling into something steadier. She had been one of Alessia’s “bright young things,” her words, not mine, a talent that had been praised loudly when she was useful and discarded quietly when she wasn’t. I had promised her that I would never use her name without permission. I had promised to protect her from the kind of exposure that fe