บททั้งหมดของ Five Years As A DoorMat Wife: Her Time To Shine: บทที่ 31 - บทที่ 40

Chapter 32She was mid-thirties, Silver estimated. Very composed, very well-dressed, with the particular posture of someone who had been told this was a networking event and had dressed accordingly. She was standing close to Seris in the way of someone who had been told this was also possibly more than a networking event and was managing the ambiguity.Silver recognized the energy. She had been in that position once.The three of them stood in the elevator.Silver pressed herself into the corner in the way of someone who was absolutely fine and simply preferred corners.Seris had seen her. Of course he had — the elevator was not large. He had seen her in the half-second before the doors closed and his expression had done something brief and complicated that he had then arranged back into professional neutral.He pressed the button for the twentieth floor.The elevator began to move."Floor seventeen?" the woman said, read

Chapter 34"My parents—" she started."Are fine," Seris said. He sat beside her. His voice was very steady. "I called. They're in Bali. They're absolutely fine. There was a miscommunication. I'm sorry, Nadine."Nadine stared at him. "They're—""Fine. I promise."The color began coming back slowly."I fainted," she said."You did. It's completely understandable.""In a corridor.""Yes."She processed this. Then she looked past Seris to where Kate was standing with the expression she'd been maintaining, which was still impressive, and still clear, and still open."You told me—" Nadine started."I'm so sorry," Kate said. "The information I had was clearly wrong. I can only apologize."Nadine looked at her for a moment.Then she looked at Seris.Then, with the specific look of a woman who had fainted in a corridor and was reassembling her dignity and her understandi

Chapter 36The session was called on short notice — not the full quarterly structure, just the working principals and Bernard Osei, because a supply disruption three weeks in wasn't the kind of thing that waited for a scheduled slot.Kate arrived early again. She always arrived early now. It had stopped being a strategy and started being simply how she did things.Silver was already there when Kate walked in, which surprised her slightly — the session hadn't required the full Winters contingent, and Silver's presence wasn't strictly mandated by the structure they'd agreed on. But there she was, in the same dark jacket she seemed to favor for these rooms, a folder closed in front of her, watching the door."You didn't have to be here," Kate said, before she could decide whether that was the right opening."I know," Silver said. "I wanted to see how you handled it."It wasn't hostile. It wasn't warm either. It was, Kate thought, something closer to professional curiosity, the kind one o

Chapter 38Kate did not look at him. She kept her eyes fixed very deliberately on the presenter, her expression a masterpiece of polite attentiveness, betrayed only by the very slight tightness around her mouth that meant she was one wrong glance away from losing it completely.He knew, without either of them saying anything, that if their eyes met again in the next ten seconds, they would both be finished. He'd seen it happen before, more times than he could count — some shared joke catching them both at the wrong moment, in the wrong room, and the two of them dissolving into the kind of laughter that made grown adults look like children who'd been caught passing notes. It had happened at a funeral once. He still hadn't fully forgiven either of them for that, though he also hadn't fully regretted it.He kept his eyes on his folder. Kate kept hers on the slide. The presenter, mercifully unaware of the danger he'd narrowly avoided triggering, resumed his summary of the concrete supplie

Chapter 40He was aware, the whole time they spoke, of the hallway's glass walls, of the assistants and junior staff moving past on their way to elevators, of the fact that any one of them might have a phone in their pocket and a reason to use it. He'd learned, in the two months since the wedding that wasn't, exactly how fast a photograph could travel and exactly how little context anyone bothered attaching to it before running the headline. *Estranged couple reunited?* *Ashford heir seen deep in conversation with runaway bride.* *Sources say the two have been secretly rekindling.* He could write the copy himself, he'd seen so many versions of it already, most of them entirely invented, all of them printed anyway because printed was cheaper than true.He answered Silver's questions. He kept his tone level, pleasant, nothing that would read as anything but business if captured out of context, though he was under no illusion that tone survived translation into a headline. A photograph d