All Chapters of My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

He woke at five forty-three.The penthouse was quiet in the way it was quiet before the city had fully committed to the day. He lay still for a moment, not trying to go back to sleep, just lying in the quality of the morning and the fact that he had slept well, which was something he had stopped taking for granted.He got up.He made coffee at the counter, the same counter, the same cabinet he knew without looking now, and he took the cup to the kitchen table. The chair with the slightly wrong angle that had become simply his chair. He sat.He thought about last night.He had not been able to stop thinking about it on the drive home, which was different from the benefit and the covered entrance and the restaurant. Those had been significant, and he had sat with them carefully. This was different in a specific way, which was that something had happened between them that had no professional frame around it. No agenda, no legal threads, no shared operational necessity.Just contact. Unpl

He mentioned it on a Thursday evening.They had been talking for forty minutes, which was what had been developing since the opera, the ease of longer conversations that did not require a professional reason to exist. He had told her about a Garrett situation that resolved well. She had told him about the Bertolucci follow-up. And then, in the same unhurried voice, he mentioned that he had made a reservation for the following Saturday at a place outside the city.He had thought she would like it.He had heard her mention it once, in passing, during dinner at her restaurant. A place in the hills that Marco had described. He had remembered it, had checked availability, had secured the reservation, and had been quietly pleased with himself.The line went quiet."You didn't ask," she said.Not sharp. The specific voice she used when she was saying something important and had decided to say it plainly rather than carefully."I thought." he started."You assumed," she said. A beat. "That's

He had asked. She had said yes.The reservation had survived the Thursday disagreement, which told him something about what they were building. Sturdy enough to have a real difficulty and continue on the other side of it.The restaurant was in the hills, forty minutes from the city, the kind of place that required knowing it existed before you could find it. He had known it existed because she had described it once, briefly, in the middle of a conversation that had been mostly about something else, and he had written it down that same evening.She arrived and looked at the building with the specific expression of someone checking a place against a description they had carried in their head.She looked at him."You found the right one," she said."You described the lighting," he said.She looked at the warm glow coming through the windows. She did not say anything for a moment. He waited. He had gotten better at waiting.They went in.…They sat for three hours.Not about the past, whi

He had been in the penthouse for nine years. He had bought it at thirty-one, before the company was what it was now, before the marriage, before any of it. High and clean with the city visible from every window, which had seemed important to him at thirty-one. The visibility. The sense of being above things. Sera had moved in gradually in the months before the wedding, which was how she did most things: carefully and without announcement. He had watched her presence accumulate and had absorbed it as background. Then she had gone, and the remaining traces of her had been absorbed in the other direction. Then Isabella, briefly, in the way things occupied spaces without belonging in them. Her things were gone within a week. He had stayed out of habit. He understood this now with the clarity that came from a year of learning to see his habits accurately. The penthouse was the place where the marriage had started and where it had ended. Where he had sat at the kitchen table and signed

The call came on a Wednesday afternoon.Roman was at his desk in the new apartment, working from home the way he had been doing more often now that home was somewhere he actually wanted to be. Kitchen to his left. Light through the windows warm rather than cold. Coffee made from the right cabinet without looking.He picked up without checking the name first. He checked after.Dante Reyes."Reyes," he said."Ashford." A pause. "Not about anything specific. I wanted to ask how you were."Roman was quiet for a moment. Not from discomfort. From the specific attention he gave to things that arrived unexpectedly and deserved to be received correctly."I'm well," he said. "You?""The same," Dante said.Another pause. Different from the professional pauses they had maintained throughout the year, the careful silences of two men managing information across a line. This one was simply two people on a call in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon.Roman waited."She laughed today," Dante said.Rom