All Chapters of LOVE ME OR HATE ME: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Daniel's POVI called her at five thirty.The floor was still half full. People finishing the end of the week with the specific Friday energy of professionals who had somewhere to be and were getting there. I could see her through the glass wall at her desk. Reading glasses on. The small notebook open beside her keyboard.I watched her pick up the phone.She looked through the glass at me.I held her gaze."Come in," I said.She came in.She sat in the chair across from my desk and looked at me with the expression she wore when she had already understood that the conversation was not professional and was giving it the specific quality of attention it required.I put the documents on the desk between us."Vivienne is suing me," I said.She looked at the documents.Then she looked at me."For what?" she said."Emotional damages," I said. "Psychological harm arising from the relationship two years ago. It is legally thin. Her counsel is good and they have found angles but the factual rec

Aria's POVShe did not call on Saturday.I had not expected her to. Vivienne did not make significant decisions quickly. That was one of the things I had always known about her even before I had understood the full picture of what that deliberateness meant. She sat with things. She turned them over. She looked at every available angle before she committed to a direction.It had always looked like careful consideration.I understood now that it was calculation.Saturday passed without a call.I told Daniel what I had done on Saturday evening.He was quiet for longer than comfortable.Then he said *Aria.*In the specific register that meant he was feeling several things simultaneously and was deciding which one to lead with."I know," I said. "You would have told me not to.""I would have told you not to," he said."I know my sister," I said. "His lawyers know the law. I know Vivienne. Those are not the same instrument."He was quiet again."Are you angry?" I said."No," he said. The fl

Aria's POVI was not supposed to be at the airport.The Thursday morning flight to Milan for the final venue walkthrough had been Daniel's suggestion and I had agreed because the October date was five weeks away and the vineyard coordinator had asked for an in person confirmation of the ceremony layout and the catering final choices and it made sense to go in person and it made sense to go now before the week before the wedding became the kind of week that did not have room for anything except itself.I had not known Vivienne was leaving on Thursday.She had not told me. That was the agreement in its unspoken version. She would go and she would go quietly and the going would be its own communication. I would not track it or monitor it or need a specific date. She would simply no longer be in the city and that would be how I would know.I was at the international terminal at seven forty in the morning with my carry on and my boarding pass and the specific focused energy of a woman with

Aria's POVThe dinner was not good.That was the honest thing about it and I was not going to pretend otherwise because pretending otherwise would have required a level of diplomacy I did not have available on a Thursday evening when I was sitting in Daniel's apartment feeling lighter than I had felt in weeks and the lightness made everything funnier than it might otherwise have been.I ate it anyway.All of it.Because he had cooked it and cooking it had cost him something in the specific way that anything requiring optimism beyond actual competence cost something and I was not going to let that cost go unreceived.He watched me finish it."You do not have to eat all of it," he said."I am eating all of it," I said."It is not good," he said."It is not bad," I said."That is the most generous thing you have ever said to me," he said.I laughed.He almost smiled.We finished the wine and cleared the table with the easy efficiency of two people who had been in the same kitchen enough

Aria's POVI sat in the chair and I listened.Becca had gone completely still on the other side of the room. The consultant had taken two quiet steps back toward the wall. The bridal shop had reduced itself to the specific focused quiet of a space where something significant was happening in one corner of it and everything else had decided to wait.I listened to the voice on the phone.Male. Calm. The specific professional calm of someone delivering information they had been asked to deliver and were delivering it cleanly without editorializing."My name is not important," he said. "Vivienne Blackwood contacted me two months ago. She wanted me to deliver something to Daniel Cole on her behalf."I held the phone against my ear.Two months ago.Two months ago Vivienne had been in another city. Before the phone call where I told her Daniel's name. Before she had come back. Before any of it had a shape or a face or a name I recognized.She had been planning this for two months.Not the de