All Chapters of The Perfect Wife Walked Away: Chapter 281 - Chapter 290

[Marie's POV]"Unaffected. It falls below the threshold of professional influence. Neither your father nor Elias Ballard considered it worth the effort to block a driver position.""Good. Let him keep it." I leaned back in my chair; my eyes still locked on my reflection. "A man who is exhausted and impoverished is a man who will eventually come home. Let him taste the life he's chosen. Let him feel the cold. Let him understand, in his bones, what it means to give up everything for a woman who —"I stopped. The sentence was incomplete, and I knew why. Because the ending I wanted to say — “who doesn't love him back” — was no longer something I could say with certainty. Not after the hospital. Not after the way Alice had sat at his bedside. Not after the way his hand had found hers and held on, as if letting go would mean drowning.It doesn't matter, I told myself. Love isn't enough. Love doesn't pay the bills. Love doesn't heal shattered hands. Love doesn't give a man back his name or h

[David’s POV]I’m driving. Away from this tangle that has snared me. Not to my corporate head office or my penthouse apartment. Not to any place where I’m supposed to be.Instead, I’m heading to Alice’s villa.Because Camilla was crying.The real kind of tears. The genuine, trembling, chest- heaving sobs of a five-year-old child who wants her mom and doesn’t understand the situation.“I want my mommy. Why can’t I see my mom? Is mom okay? Why isn’t mom here?”Her anguish cut deep, and I had to comfort her. I hugged her. I rocked her. I promised that her mother was fine, she was just resting, and she would see her mother soon.My promise tasted bitter because I didn’t have the right to use the word ‘soon.’ I had no right to decide when Alice would see her daughter. I no longer had the right to decide anything in Alice’s life. She wasn’t my wife anymore. She was, strictly speaking, my ex-wife — a woman who had looked me in the eye and chosen her independence.So, I drove Camilla to the v

[Alice's POV]He smiled. That real, unguarded smile that I was learning to live for. "I've had a lot of practice at wanting to be somewhere," he said. "Now I actually am."A week passed. Then two. Adam drove his ride-share shifts in the morning and came home in the afternoon and did his physical therapy exercises in the living room while Camilla ‘supervised.’This meant that she sat on the balance board and refused to move, telling him he was ‘doing it wrong’ with the devastating honesty of a five-year-old. I cooked, or tried to. I read the journals Endall kept sending. I felt the baby grow — the kicks becoming stronger, more insistent, the rolling movements more defined, as if the child was already practicing for the marathon of existence.And I lost even more weight.It happened slowly, then all at once. The same way cancer always progresses. A gradual accumulation of small changes that suddenly coalesce into a reality that can no longer be ignored. My face became sharper, the cheek

[Alice's POV]I was moved to a room on the oncology ward. A private room. Dr. Ibanez arranged it, perhaps out of professional courtesy towards Adam. The room had a window overlooking the same Alpine view that had been in Adam's room when he was a patient here. The same mountains. The same snow. The same indifferent beauty of a world that did not care whether the people watching it lived or died.I was lying on the bed when Adam came back to the room. He had been making phone calls — to Endall, I assumed, or Camilla’s babysitter. Or maybe to Dr. Ibanez, demanding updates with the ferocity of a man who had been stripped of his medical authority and was compensating with sheer force of will.He sat in the chair beside my bed. Took my hand. Didn't speak."Adam?" I tried."Don't.""I need to know what you saw. On the scans. You saw something."His jaw tightened. His thumb kept moving across my knuckles. A small, repetitive motion, self-soothing, the physical equivalent of counting to ten.

[Adam's POV]The corridor smells like antiseptic and despair.I’m standing outside Alice’s hospital room with my back pressed against the wall. I can see her through the narrow window in the door. She’s asleep. She’s exhausted from all the tests, from the sheer effort of keeping a body alive that was determined to tear itself apart from the inside.Fifteen percent.That number echoes in my skull like a death knell. It means an eighty-five percent chance of a world without Alice in it. Fifteen percent means I would probably be standing at a graveside, instead of an altar. The dream I’ve carried for a decade — the church with the lilacs, her head on my chest, a life built from the rubble of our respective disasters — would evaporate like morning dew.But I have made a promise. “Okay. Together. We fight together.”I have pledged to lead the battle with her. To stand by her side, no matter what gets thrown our way.But how did you fight an enemy that also needs a lifeline? How do you wage