All Chapters of SHE WAS NEVER HIS MISTRESS : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Flynn's POV. "Tell me what happened."Dr. Wren's office looked the same as it always did. The same grey chair, same plant in the corner that had no business being as healthy as it was and the same quality of quiet that existed nowhere else in my life. I had always found it either deeply settling or deeply exposing depending on the day.Today it was both.I told her everything.I told it without editing anything. That part was harder than the telling itself. Dr. Wren had spent one year teaching me the difference between recounting something and performing it. I still had to catch myself mid sentence sometimes, still had to pull back from the version that made me look better or worse than the plain facts did.She listened without interrupting.When I finished, the office was quiet for a moment. "What's the argument for telling her?" Dr. Wren said."She deserves to know.""And against?"I looked at my hands. "She is eighteen days out from the most important professional moment of her

DOMINIC'S POVThe quarterly infrastructure deal closed on a Tuesday and my team celebrated in the conference room with champagne I'd approved the budget for and didn't drink.I shook the right hands, said the right things, gave credit where it was due, which wasn't difficult because my team had genuinely done the work and I was not the kind of man who took credit he hadn't earned. I smiled at the correct moments, answered the right questions, performed the version of myself the room required, and then I got in the car and told Marcus to drive slowly.Nobody in any meeting had looked at me with anything other than the usual professional attention.I was very good at this. Performing competence had been built into me since I was eighteen years old and the alternative was going back to South Boston with nothing to show for the scholarship, the years of not sleeping and the hunger that had gotten me out in the first place. You didn't unlearn that. It became the operating system underneath

ARIA'S POV Vincent submitted my name four months ago without telling me. I found out two weeks ago via a formal letter on heavy cream paper addressed to *Ms. Aria Sinclair, Emerging Artist of the Year Nominee and a one of the hosts for the year* I read it twice standing at my kitchen counter still in my coat from the walk home and then I called Vincent and his first words were: "Before you say anything, the foundation's president specifically requested you after the Visual Arts Council panel and I was not going to say no on your behalf." I said a number of things. He listened to all of them and then said: "You're doing it, Aria." And I obeyed. The dress I bought for tonight is burgundy. Deep, almost wine. I bought it specifically because it was nothing like the green one from the gala. Nothing like any dress I'd worn when I was Dominic's fiancée or before that when I was Flynn's wife. I stood in the shop and looked at it on the hanger and thought: that one. Because it belonge

*Two weeks ago*ISABELLA'S POVI kept seeing her walk away.That was the thing that wouldn't leave me alone. Not the conversation itself, or the words I'd said or the way Aria's face had gone still while I said them. Just the after part. The moment she folded her napkin, picked up her bag, said thank you for lunch in that voice that had nothing in it except the decision to keep going.And then she walked out with her back straight and an even pace. The walk of a woman who had been hit before and knew how to keep moving without letting the hitting show.I had done that to her.I sat on my kitchen floor with a glass of wine I'd poured and not touched. My back against the cabinet and I let that sit in me without trying to manage it into something more comfortable. I had done that to a woman who had done nothing to me except fall in love with the same man I loved.I had three versions of the justification. She deserved to know. The truth was coming out eventually. Dominic had been given

ARIA'S POV This is the fifth time I saw this same car and I decided to take photographs. I didn't panic. I didn't move away from the window or tell myself I was imagining it. I picked up my phone, opened the camera, and documented. Five times in two weeks. It's been the same car at different times of day but always there long enough to mean something. I sat at my kitchen table with the photographs on my phone, looked at them and thought about what to do next. I called Jordan. She answered on the second ring. I told her what I had. The car, the five sightings and the photographs with timestamps. I said it plainly because that was the only way I knew how to say things that frightened me. Plain, factual and without the emotional framing that made them harder to hold. "File a report then" Jordan said. “Against who? Maybe they are just an innocent person who has nothing to do with me” “You know who Aria” "I don't know for certain it's him." "Aria." "I know," I said.