All Chapters of Game Of Chess With My Ex-Husband's Uncle : Chapter 101 - Chapter 109

~ Lorenzo's POVI did not deny it.This is the part that people would find difficult to understand, and I find that I have no particular interest in making it easy for them. The people in that doorway, the legal staff and the unknown woman and Marco with his performed horror, were all waiting for the denial, expecting it, because that is the sequence that follows an accusation in the experience of most people. Accusation arrives, denial follows, and then the negotiation between the two determines what the world decides to believe. I did not give them the sequence. I simply stood beside my father's chair and looked at Marco and said nothing, and watched the confusion that produced move through the room like weather.Marco recovered from the confusion quickly, because Marco was not unintelligent and he understood that my silence was a gift he had not expected to receive and that the correct response to an unexpected gift was to take it before it was rescinded.He turned to the people be

~ Vivienne's POVI did not book any flights.I had said it with the conviction of someone who meant it, and in the moment of saying it I had meant it, or had meant the feeling underneath it, the desperate need to put distance between myself and the proximity of everything that Lorenzo's world contained. But when I sat down the next morning with my laptop open and the travel search page loaded, I stared at the departure fields for a long time and then closed the laptop and made coffee instead.Dante was here. His school was here. His doctors were here, the team monitoring his recovery from the procedure, the follow-up appointments that were still ongoing and that I was not willing to interrupt for the sake of my own need to feel like I was taking decisive action. I told myself these were the reasons. They were real reasons. They were also, I was aware, doing some additional work beyond simply being true.So I stayed, and I avoided Lorenzo, and I discovered that avoiding Lorenzo Blackwe

~ Vivienne's POVSomeone grabbed my arm.It was one of the security staff, a broad-shouldered man whose name I had never learned despite passing him at the entrance desk every morning for two years, and he was holding my arm with the firm and well-intentioned grip of someone performing their function correctly."Ma'am, you can't go back in. The building is being evacuated, you need to stay—""Let go of my arm," I said.The tone of my voice was not a tone I used often and it surprised him enough that his grip loosened by a fraction, and that fraction was sufficient. I pulled free and walked toward the entrance.Two more people moved to intercept me before I reached the doors, one of the facility's safety officers and a woman from the administrative floor whose name I knew was Sandra and who was saying something sensible and urgent that I was not processing. I went around the safety officer and through the doors before Sandra could complete her sentence, and behind me I heard voices esc

~ Vivienne's POVI stared at him."Marco," I said."Yes.""Marco killed Richard Blackwell.""Yes."I turned the information over in my mind the way you turned something fragile over, carefully and with the awareness that its full weight had not yet been felt. Marco, who had stood in that meeting room doorway with his prepared voice and his selected witnesses and his finger pointing at Lorenzo with the performance of a man who had arrived to discover something rather than a man who had arranged it. Marco, who had accused Lorenzo in a room that he had already been inside before Lorenzo arrived. Marco, whose motive I could construct in my sleep, the inheritance, the board, the slow and inexorable movement of the Blackwell group's power in a direction that was not his."How did you find out?" I asked.Lorenzo looked at me with the particular patience of someone waiting for a question to catch up with its own answer."Lorenzo.""Who do you think I am, Vivienne?" he said, not unkindly.I he

~ Lorenzo's POVI have planned very few things in my life with joy.Planning, in my experience, had always been a function of necessity rather than pleasure, the cold and structural work of someone who understood that outcomes required architecture and that architecture required precision and that precision left no room for the kind of looseness that joy introduced. I had planned business manoeuvres and legal strategies and the slow dismantling of family empires, and I had done all of it with the focused detachment of a man who understood that emotional investment in a plan was a liability rather than an asset.Planning the wedding was different.I noticed this about myself with the slightly bemused quality of a man encountering a version of himself he had not previously had occasion to meet. I sat across from Vivienne in my apartment three days after the car park with a notepad between us that had been her idea and which I had initially regarded as unnecessary, and I found myself wit