All Chapters of My Ex Husband's Biggest Regret : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Dante showed her the text on Saturday morning.He set his phone on the kitchen table beside her coffee without a word and waited. She picked it up and read it.*She handled it perfectly.*Five words. Roman's name at the top of Dante's screen. Sent Friday morning, two days after the profile ran.She set the phone down."He texted you," she said."Yes.""Not me.""No." Dante picked his phone up and put it back in his pocket. "He knew you hadn't opened a direct line. He used the one that was available."Sera looked at the table. Her coffee. The morning briefing she hadn't opened yet."He got your number from Garrett," she said."That's my assumption.""He texted instead of called.""Yes."She was quiet for a moment. The kitchen was warm. Rosa was somewhere in the back of the house. The estate doing its Saturday thing, slow and without urgency."He's learning the boundaries," Sera said."Yes," Dante said.She picked up her coffee and drank and set it back down.She thought about the archi

Third section of the morning intelligence stack, a single paragraph. Contact pattern between Harrington and two entities inside Aldric's known network. Not confirmed. Not fully documented. A flag, the kind they raised when something needed watching.Sera read it. She noted it. She moved to the next item.She told herself it was not her problem.Ashford Global was not a Montague holding. Roman was not her responsibility. She had sent the forty-seven page file because Aldric was coming for them next. She had sent the associate names because it was an equal exchange. She had sent the counter-documentation through Reeves because Aldric's attack directly affected Montague exposure. Every decision hadn't a clean strategic rationale. She had stated it clearly when asked.Harrington was different. A board-level threat to a company she had no formal stake in. The Montague exposure from the Aldric operation had been neutralized. There was no honest strategic line she could draw from Harrington

Dante set his phone on her desk at half past two. No preamble. He never used preamble when something needed to land on its own. She picked it up and read it. *The board held. Thank her.* Four words. Roman's name at the top of the screen. Sent eleven minutes ago, which meant before the official confirmation had even finished moving through proper channels. She read it once. Something moved in her chest. Small and specific, the precise quality of a thing landing where it had been quietly aimed. She recognized it without looking at it directly. She put the phone down. "Tell him good," she said. She picked up her pen. "Nothing else." Dante looked at her. "Just that?" "Just that." He typed. He sent it. She found the line in the document where she had been before he came in, and she kept reading. Dante left. She worked. … She didn't notice herself being different for the rest of the afternoon. That was the thing about it. She had no awareness of any shift. She reviewed the fi

The quarterly board meeting started at nine sharp. Twelve members around the table. The legitimate side of Montague operations, the part the world saw and all twelve of them served. Sera had chaired this meeting four times now. The first time, three of the twelve had watched her with the specific quality of attention that meant they were waiting to find out whether she was real. Two years of numbers later, none of them watched her that way anymore. She opened without preamble. "The Devlin results first," she said. "Then the northern portfolio review. Then, the foundation allocation, which we're resolving before lunch." Twelve people settled. The room found its productive stillness within the first two minutes, the way it did when a meeting was run well. She had learned to produce this from watching Savio. She could produce it reliably now. The Devlin acquisition had closed eleven months ago at a price point that drew scepticism from two board members at the time. Ricci had voted

Roman was in the study at eleven.No whiskey. He hadn't been drinking the way he had been drinking in the months before the divorce and the months immediately after. That had been a specific kind of numbing, and he had stopped it without making a dramatic decision about stopping it, the way you stopped things sometimes when the reason for them had quietly changed.He was reading. A book Felix had mentioned off-handedly at the conference, the way Felix mentioned things he thought were worth someone's time. Roman had ordered it the following week and had been working through it slowly for a month. He reads differently now. Not the way he used to, with one part of his attention while the rest of him was somewhere else. He was learning to put all of it in one place.His phone was face-down on the desk.The penthouse was different since Isabella had gone. Quieter, yes, but different in a more specific way, the way spaces were different when something wrong had been removed and you had time