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Home / Urban / My Divorced Husband Is Never Coming Back / Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

All Chapters of My Divorced Husband Is Never Coming Back: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

100 Chapters

Chapter 81

Randy's povThe question hung in the air between us and the room waited for my answer with the collective patience of people who had invested enough attention in the preceding minutes to feel entitled to the next development.I looked at Clara and thought about how to answer honestly without turning the answer into a speech, and while I was thinking Clara spoke again and the direction of the conversation changed entirely."Randy, it's okay," she said, and her voice had taken on a gentleness that was directed at me like something being offered carefully, the way you offer something to a person you think might refuse it. "I know you're not proud that you took the money." She paused and her expression arranged itself into something that was performing understanding, the face of someone being magnanimous. "And that's okay. Because I forgive you." Another pause. "So you won't be penalized for stealing from me."I looked at her.The silence between the end of her sentence and whatever was g

Chapter 82

Randy's povClara was still looking at me. Kyle's threat was still in the air somewhere, doing whatever threats do when no one picks them up. But Clara was looking at me with the specific focus of someone who has decided to proceed as though nothing exists in the room except the two of us, and it was a focus I recognized from the version of her that appeared when she wanted something badly enough to filter out everything peripheral."Randy," she said. "Please say something."She said it the way people say things when they have run out of the more elaborate approaches and have arrived at simple asking, which in Clara's case took considerably longer to arrive at than it did for most people.I looked at her and considered the question."What do you want me to say, Clara?" I asked. The question was genuine. I was curious what answer she had prepared for the version of this conversation that lived in her head, the one where I received everything she'd been saying and produced the response

Chapter 83

Randy's povThe question Clara had just asked was still settling into the room when she asked the next one, her voice finding a steadiness that hadn't been there a moment ago, something clicking into place behind her eyes as pieces she had been holding separately began to find each other."The mysterious lead physicist who led the research and clinical trials for the spinal cord regenerative medication," she said, and she said it slowly, not because she was uncertain but because she was confirming, running the information through herself one more time to make sure it held together. "The same one I spoke with over the phone?"She looked at me with a small smile forming at the corner of her mouth, the particular smile of someone who is arriving at something that surprises them but also, somewhere underneath the surprise, makes a certain kind of sense.I said nothing. I looked at the faces arranged in front of me and I let the silence do what it was doing, which was giving everyone prese

Chapter 84

Kyle's povI heard Selene before I fully understood what she was saying.The words were low, directed at the space beside her rather than at anyone in particular, but the room had gone quiet enough in the past few minutes that low didn't mean private anymore, and I caught the shape of them clearly enough to make my head turn toward her."I'll beg Randy for forgiveness," she was saying, still in that same half-to-herself register, her eyes on the medal in her hands, "and help Clara mend things with Randy."I stared at her profile.Selene. The same Selene who had been standing beside me all evening. The same Selene who had thrown the medal at his face not ten minutes ago. The same Selene who had spent the better part of a year telling Clara in terms that left no room for interpretation exactly what kind of man Randy was and exactly what Clara's life would look like if she kept chasing him.That Selene was now talking about begging for forgiveness."Wha—" I started."Randy, I didn't know

Chapter 85

Kyle's povThe words had left my mouth and the guards had shifted their weight in the way of people responding to a direct instruction and the evening was finally moving in the direction I needed it to move in.Then Clara stepped in front of Randy.She put herself between him and the approaching guards with her arms slightly out at her sides, the physical posture of someone using their body as an argument, and she looked at me with an expression that had none of the brightness in it that had been there a moment ago when she was looking at him."No, Kyle," she said, and her voice had the particular quality of someone trying to reach a person they can see is past the point of easy reaching. "Don't do this. If not for him, then for me." She held my gaze. "Please."I looked at her standing there shielding him and felt the heat in my chest find new fuel.Then Randy moved her.Not roughly, not with the force of someone removing an obstacle, but with a deliberate gentleness that was somehow

Chapter 86

Randy's povThe voice had come from the entrance and the room had turned and Angel was walking toward us across the banquet hall floor with the unhurried pace of someone who owns the ground they're walking on, which in this particular case was literally true.She was dressed for the occasion in a way that communicated that the occasion had been designed around her preferences rather than the other way around, and the room responded to her entrance the way rooms respond to people who carry genuine authority, not with noise but with a quality of attention that was different from the attention that had been in the room before she arrived.Her eyes found me immediately and the smile that came onto her face when they did was easy, genuine, kind, and uncomplicated by the evening's preceding events because she had walked in after most of them and was reading the room with the quick comprehensive attention of someone very good at reading rooms.She crossed the remaining distance and came to m

Chapter 87

Randy's pov The inconsistency would have been funny if I hadn't been standing in the middle of it. Selene looking around the room for Mr White while Mr White stood directly in front of her was the kind of thing that wrote itself, and the small sound that came out of me was genuine, a low chuckle that I didn't fully plan, produced by the specific comedy of watching a person search for something they are looking directly at without knowing it. Clara was standing beside me and the warmth she had been directing at me had redirected itself entirely toward Angel, her eyes doing the thing eyes do when they have decided on a target and are not interested in looking anywhere else. I could feel it from where I was standing without having to look at her directly. Angel looked at Selene with the patient expression of someone who has made a statement and is waiting for it to arrive at its destination. "Mr White is Randy," she said, and she gestured toward me with the easy, unhurried movem

Chapter 88

Randy's povThe sound of the two slaps was still settling into the room when the gasps arrived, a wave of them moving through the gathered guests like something physical, the collective response of people who have been watching a situation escalate all evening and have just witnessed it reach a point they hadn't fully anticipated.Kyle's hand went to his cheek and Selene's hand went to hers and for a moment they were mirror images of each other, standing side by side with identical expressions of pure suspended shock, their mouths open and their eyes wide and the redness blooming on their faces doing the quiet work of evidence.The room had gone to the kind of silence that follows something irreversible. The kind that doesn't rush to fill itself.Mr Jake stood between them and me with his expression still carrying the heat of what he had just done, not regret, not reconsideration, just the settled certainty of someone who has assessed a situation and responded to it in the way they de

Chapter 89

Randy's povThe smile came on its own. I found myself genuinely wondering, not for the first time this evening, whether Kyle had always operated at this particular altitude of obliviousness or whether the year I had been away had done something to accelerate it. The Kyle I remembered from the years of my marriage was calculating in the way that certain people are calculating, always reading the room for advantage, always positioned slightly ahead of the next move. What was standing in front of me now had lost the calculation somewhere and replaced it with a confidence that had no foundation left under it but hadn't noticed yet."None of you can touch me," Kyle added, and his voice found the upward note at the end of the sentence that people's voices find when they are trying to convince themselves as much as their audience. "Not a single one of you."The silence that followed had a quality to it.Then Jake laughed.It was not a polite laugh or a social one. It came up from somewhere

Chapter 90

Randy's pov"That still isn't right," he said, and he said it with the dogged persistence of someone who has decided that reality is negotiable if you push back against it with enough conviction. He looked around the room as though searching for people who agreed with him, and finding no obvious candidates continued anyway. "Someone with a background like Randy's isn't supposed to attain a prestigious feat like this." He gestured at me in the way he had been gesturing at me all evening, the gesture that was meant to indicate that my existence in any elevated context was a category error. "It doesn't make sense."I rolled my eyes on the inside and kept my face where it was.Selene had apparently decided that whatever brief detour she had taken toward reconsidering her position earlier in the evening was fully behind her now, the alliance with Kyle reasserting itself with the ease of something returning to its natural shape after a temporary distortion."Exactly," she said, stepping for

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