All Chapters of He Chose my Cousin, so I Chose Revenge: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

The café was hidden down a narrow lane off West 31st. It had no signboard, only a small brass plate on the door and the scent of warm cardamom bread spilling out through the seams of its old wood frame. I arrived fifteen minutes early. I could not help it. My nerves had been sharpened all morning, wound tight from the moment the encrypted message confirmed the meeting time. Eleanor Chen had given no explanation, only a date, a location, and one line: You’ll want to hear this in person. I stepped inside and let the door shut behind me. The noise of the city faded like it had been swallowed whole. The place was quiet, lit with soft amber lights and lined with worn shelves full of mismatched porcelain cups. A man behind the counter offered a polite smile, but I only nodded and moved to a corner table near the window. I didn’t order anything. I couldn’t have kept anything down. I watched the steam rise from someone else’s teacup and pressed my palm against the cool marble table. When E

I woke to the sound of my phone buzzing across the marble countertop, the vibration sharp and insistent, dragging me out of a sleep that had barely held me through the night. My limbs were heavy. My mind was still lodged in the scattered thoughts that had kept circling long after midnight—meetings postponed, contracts still unsigned, and the slow unraveling of certainty I had tried so hard to hold onto.I didn’t rush to grab the phone. I lay still for a moment, trying to pull my thoughts into order. The apartment was silent except for the dull hum of the city beyond the windows. The air felt tense, like it was bracing for something I had yet to name.When I finally reached for the phone, my breath caught before I even saw the full content of the alerts. The headlines lit up my lock screen, one after another, in that tone of detached precision that always felt more dangerous than something openly cruel. They were brief, cutting, curated to destabilize without appear

It began quietly, the way most things that matter do. There was no press release. No bold campaign rollout. No carefully worded email from the PR team. Just Claudia. Just one photo. She had posted it early in the morning, the kind of hour when the world is still shaking off sleep, and the feed is usually filled with soft lighting and coffee cups. But hers was different. It was from six years ago, taken in the back room of our original studio, before the walls had been painted over and the lighting fixed. We were both younger in it, with dark circles under our eyes and fabric dust on our clothes, surrounded by bolts of unfinished textiles and mismatched mugs. We were laughing in that picture, shoulders slightly leaned into each other, the kind of laugh that came not from something particularly funny, but from exhaustion and shared absurdity. Her caption was brief, but it cut deeper than any trending headline had managed to.“She gave me a place when no one else would. I’ll never forget

I hadn’t told her I’d moved again.She must have gotten the address from Lena or maybe even Mara. I didn’t ask. When I heard the knock that morning, soft and short with no impatience behind it, I almost ignored it. I had been sitting at the dining table with my laptop open and nothing typed. The screen glowed with a blank document, but my mind had refused to form words all morning.I was still in my robe. I hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t brushed my hair. I had told Julian I needed the day to myself, and he had nodded without asking why. The studio was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of silence that crept in through the windows and clung to the walls. It didn’t feel like stillness. It felt like waiting.The knock came again.I pushed back my chair and went to the door, already expecting someone from the building, maybe a delivery mistake. But when I opened it, she was there. My mother. Standing in the hallway in her navy cardigan and ballet flats, holding a plastic container wrapped in a kitchen to

I had stopped checking the time two hours ago.The apartment had gone still. I was lying sideways on the couch in a pair of cotton pants and a threadbare long-sleeved shirt I had owned since before Roman. The overhead lights were off, and I hadn’t bothered to light a candle or even turn on the soft lamp by the window. The only illumination came from the city itself. Pockets of warm yellow from passing cars. A flicker of fluorescent from the restaurant across the street. The soft red of the clock on the microwave that never blinked but made me feel watched.Julian had sent a message earlier saying he would be at the workshop late. One of the seam lines had warped during shipment, and he was staying to sort it out. He told me not to wait up. I hadn’t responded. Not because I didn’t want to. I just didn’t want to see the screen light up again, reminding me of how quiet everything had become once the adrenaline of the court hearing wore off.I hadn’t cried. I hadn’t let the tension spill