All Chapters of Game Of Chess With My Ex-Husband's Uncle : Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

~ Vivienne's POVWe stayed in the bedroom for a little while longer after that, the conversation settling into something quieter, less about anything specific and more about the simple fact of being horizontal and unhurried in the same space. Lorenzo had one arm behind his head and I was beside him with my legs tucked up, and we talked in the easy, wandering way of people who have recently stopped needing to be careful with each other, moving between topics without agenda. He asked about my team at the lab, the people I worked most closely with, and I found myself describing them with an affection I hadn't fully registered I felt until I heard myself expressing it. He listened in that complete way of his, occasionally asking something that told me he had retained every detail I had previously mentioned about my work, which continued to be quietly remarkable.The tablet sounds from the living room had shifted register. Less triumphant, more concentrated, the particular focused silence

~ Vivienne's POVLorenzo took me to the small private waiting area at the end of the corridor outside the lab, a room that existed for exactly this kind of purpose, beige walls and upholstered chairs and a window that looked out onto the side of another building. I had walked past it hundreds of times without ever sitting in it. I sat in it now and stared at the window and did not see the building outside.He sat beside me and did not speak, which was the correct thing to do and which I suspected he understood without being told. There was nothing to say that would address what had just happened in that room, and he was not a man who filled silence with noise for the sake of filling it. He sat with me in it instead, his presence a fact I leaned against without meaning to.I kept seeing Catherine's face. The confusion in it, and then the fear, and then the absence of everything. I kept running the compound's composition through my mind the way I had run it hundreds of times before, che

~ Vivienne's POVLorenzo took me to the small private waiting area at the end of the corridor outside the lab, a room that existed for exactly this kind of purpose, beige walls and upholstered chairs and a window that looked out onto the side of another building. I had walked past it hundreds of times without ever sitting in it. I sat in it now and stared at the window and did not see the building outside.He sat beside me and did not speak, which was the correct thing to do and which I suspected he understood without being told. There was nothing to say that would address what had just happened in that room, and he was not a man who filled silence with noise for the sake of filling it. He sat with me in it instead, his presence a fact I leaned against without meaning to.I kept seeing Catherine's face. The confusion in it, and then the fear, and then the absence of everything. I kept running the compound's composition through my mind the way I had run it hundreds of times before, che

~ Vivienne's POVI heard what he said and I was certain, for a moment, that I had misunderstood him.I looked at Lorenzo's face and found nothing there that suggested he had misspoken or was speaking theoretically or was offering the idea as a starting point to be refined into something more palatable. He was entirely serious, in the way that he was serious about most things, with a calm and settled quality that indicated the idea had not just arrived but had been considered and found workable before he gave it to the room.I sat up straighter."No," I said.The word came out before anything more structured could form behind it, immediate and unqualified. Lorenzo looked at me without surprise, which meant he had expected it."Vivienne," Jadon said."No." I turned to my brother, whose expression contained something I did not want to see in it, something that was not disagreement. "Jadon, we are not doing that. We are not taking what happened to me and putting it on someone who did not

~ Lorenzo's POVI looked at the notification for a moment longer than I needed to.It was a message from a number I recognised as one of the internal lines from the Blackwell estate, used by the household staff for formal communications, the kind of number that did not send messages unless something required a physical presence that could not be arranged by any other means. The message itself was brief. Six words. The Chairman requests your attendance tonight. Urgent.I had received variations of this message before. I had ignored most of them. The relationship between myself and Richard Blackwell was not one that operated on the conventional frequencies of family obligation, and we had both understood that for long enough that the understanding had calcified into something resembling mutual respect, which was perhaps the most either of us had managed.But something about the specific word urgent, and the specific hour, and the specific day that had already contained more than its rea