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All Chapters of Everything Except You: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

145 Chapters

Chapter 121: The Mirror

He didn't decide where he was going. His hands decided for him, turning the wheel toward the one place he'd spent two and a half years teaching himself not to drive to. He had spent two and a half years believing he understood what had happened. Tonight, for the first time, he wasn't sure he understood any of it. He got as far as the end of her street before he slowed down. He hadn't noticed it the last time. He noticed it now. A pink bicycle. Training wheels. A plastic streamer twisting lazily in the evening breeze. It looked lived in. Loved. His fingers tightened around the steering wheel. He didn't know why. He didn't park. He didn't get out. He turned the car around and drove home instead, because whatever this was, he wasn't ready to find out the rest of it parked outside her house in the dark like a man with no better options. ⸻ That evening, his phone rang. Michael. "Sir. The surveillance flagged movement. She's at La Luxe in Sherman Oaks. The child i

Chapter 122: Shipwreck

Riyana was watching Liyana with those eyes. Curious. Unafraid. Liyana was watching Riyana. For one quiet moment, they simply looked at each other with the uncomplicated curiosity only children possessed. Then Riyana smiled, wide and sudden and completely her own, and waved. At him. At Liyana. His hand lifted. Barely. By the time he realized what he was doing, she'd already disappeared into the crowd. Amy steered her toward the food court. In three seconds they were gone. Raiyan stood at the mall entrance holding Liyana and did not move. "Raiyan," Amirah said, beside him. He didn't look at her. "Raiyan," she said again, quieter this time. She followed his gaze to where the child had been. She went completely still. She looked from the crowd to Liyana, then back to Raiyan. "Is that…" She didn't finish. She didn't know how. He didn't answer. He couldn't. Liyana patted his face. "Daddy. Can we get more ice cream?" He looked at his daughter. Her face. H

Chapter 123: Shards of Lies

Zoya walked toward him, her heels sinking into the sand until she kicked them off."Why did you call?" She kept her voice steady. Professional. "Raiyan. Please—"He looked up.She looked like she had stepped out of a memory.A white night maxi dress flowed around her with every step, the ocean breeze catching the fabric and moving it like waves around her. Her hair was pulled into a loose bun, a few strands escaping around her face, making her look softer than the woman he had faced across courtrooms and battles.For a moment, Raiyan forgot everything except the woman walking toward him, she was the woman he'd once been lucky enough to hold.Their eyes met.Zoya stopped. The air left her lungs.She had never seen Raiyan break or cry once in their entire marriage, and even then, he had hidden his face as if his pain were a crime. He wasn't hiding now.His eyes were wet, burning with a light so dark it made her knees weak. His jaw was locked, the pulse in his temple thrumming.He looked

Chapter 124: The Footprints

He stared at her, chest hitching, the shadows under his eyes looking like bruises in the pale moonlight, his jaw rough with a day's worth of stubble. "I don't care if you marry Faiyaz. Adrian. Whoever comes next." A dry, empty laugh. "You already ruined whatever was left of my life. But I won't let you do it to them." His fingers loosened just enough for her pulse to hammer against her skin, but he didn't release her. "Why?" he asked, lower now, the anger burning down to ash. "Why didn't you tell me you were carrying twins?" "Need a reminder?" She searched his face. "Fine. Listen this time, because you sure as hell didn't let me finish back then." "The night I was going to tell you," she said, her voice dropping into that steady register, "you'd already decided I was carrying someone else's kids." "Not yours." He blinked once. His grip tightened around her wrist without him realizing it. "You never told me what my fault was, Raiyan." Her gaze dug into him. "One night you were

Chapter 125: Collateral

In Zurich, Past ten on a Wednesday, three weeks into Mona’s working for him, and the office had emptied out around them. Adam’s phone had lit up with his mother’s name twice already and Natalya’s three times after that. He silenced both without looking. There were conversations waiting for him at home that he had no intention of having tonight. Adam came out of the last call. Mona was still at her desk, laptop open, going through the file line by line like she was hunting for something specific. "Go home," he said, loosening his tie as he crossed toward her. "In a minute." She didn't look up. "Show me," he said, dropping into the chair across from her. She turned the screen. He came around the desk to look, closer than the document required, and neither of them commented on that. "There," she said, tapping the paragraph. "Subsection four. It contradicts page nine." He read it twice. She was right, and it was the kind of thing that would have cost him a quarter million dollars

Chapter 126: Busy

In LA, Zoya drove back from the beach with her hands shaking on the wheel. She did not cry. She was too numb to cry. Her mind kept replaying his eyes. That was the part that broke her. Not the shouting. Not the accusations. Just him and the way he had said her name, the old way, like nothing had happened between them at all. By the time she reached Joseph’s house, her face was calm again. She had learned how to do that a long time ago. Faiyaz was waiting at the door. Amer stood beside him with a laptop under his arm, which meant this was not a social visit. “You’re late,” Faiyaz said. Then he looked at her face and stopped joking. “What happened.” “Nothing,” Zoya said. “Nothing happened.” He looked at her face for a second longer. He did not push. He knew her well enough to know when pushing would cost more than it got him. “We found something,” he said instead. “About Loujain.” Zoya sat down at the table. She needed something else to think about, and this wa

Chapter 127: The Sister

Raiyan came home at nine forty-three. He knew the time because Liyana announced it the moment he was through the door, "Daddy you were GONE so long," with the outrage of someone who had been tracking his absence and had opinions about it. He almost smiled before he could stop himself. For the last several hours, his thoughts had kept returning to a little girl he had not known existed. And here was the other one, throwing herself at him with the same certainty she always had, as if nothing in his world had changed. He caught her before she finished the sentence. She launched herself at him from three feet away with complete confidence, arms around his neck, and he held her tighter than usual, his face pressed into her hair, staying there a second longer than he normally allowed himself to. "I know," he said. "I am back now." "I waited," she said. "I waited and waited and waited." "How many waits?" he asked. She considered this seriously. "A hundred." "That's a lot," h

Chapter 128: Echoes of Home

Zoya got home at twelve forty after a day of back-to-back meetings.The house was dark except for the lamp she always left burning in the front room. She let herself in quietly, out of habit more than necessity, and set her bag on the counter.She went upstairs first.Riyana was asleep on her side, one hand curled against her cheek, the little star nightlight throwing soft shapes across the ceiling. Zoya stood in the doorway for a moment, the way she always did, counting the rise and fall of her breathing until it steadied something in her own chest.She didn't wake her.She pulled the door most of the way closed and went back downstairs.Her phone buzzed once on the counter.*Amirah: Tell Riyana her aunt is already looking forward to spoiling her. Tell her she has a whole family here that already loves her. And when you're ready, I'd love to tell her that myself.*Zoya read it twice. She didn't answer right away. She set the phone face down and pressed her palm flat against the count

Chapter 129: Family Thing

Amirah sat on her bed that night, laptop closed, the Meridian files finally out of reach for a few hours, and found herself thinking about Matthew instead of anything that had happened in that meeting.*Family thing.*She'd turned the phrase over so many times in the last two days it had started to lose its shape. A parent, maybe. A sibling. Something ordinary and forgivable that simply hadn't occurred to him to mention, because why would he, three months wasn't very long, and she wasn't entitled to explanations just because she'd started keeping track of when he was late.She picked up her phone.Told herself it was work related. The Friday filing deadline, technically, gave her a reason.She called him.It rang twice."Hello?"Amirah blinked.It wasn't Matthew.A girl's voice came through the speaker instead, confident, a little dry, the specific tone of a kid who'd decided answering the phone properly was beneath making a whole production of it."Oh." Amirah sat up straighter. "Hi.

Chapter 130: Verdict

Trial 6 The jury came back at 2:14.Zoya sat at the prosecution table, hands flat over her closed file. Her face gave nothing away.When the foreman stood, she didn't look at the defense table. She kept her eyes on him."On the matter of environmental negligence," the foreman said, "the jury finds the defendant, Mansoor Corporation, liable."The room shifted. People moved in their seats."With respect to damages—the jury awards full compensatory damages to the plaintiff class as specified in exhibit eighty-one. The jury further recommends mandatory environmental remediation of the eastern watershed and affected community zones, subject to independent environmental review and enforceable compliance clauses."In the back row, someone put a hand over their mouth.The foreman read the rest: the operational penalties and the corporate compliance review within ninety days. Then he sat down, and the judge took over with sentencing parameters.Zoya stopped listening.It wasn't because she fe

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