All Chapters of The wife I forgot to love: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Helena had her hair up.She had decided that morning without telling Cassidy. She stood at the bathroom mirror and put it up herself and looked at the result and thought yes and moved on. When Cassidy arrived at five thirty and saw it she said nothing for a moment. Then she said good. Like Helena had passed a test Cassidy had not told her she was taking.Cassidy was in the green dress Helena had told her about. Not a copy of Helena's. Her own. Something she had bought that afternoon in the two hours between the grocery store and now. Helena had not asked about the grocery store. She had noticed the bag from a shop Cassidy did not usually go to and filed it without comment.They were getting ready in the way they had always gotten ready together. Cassidy at the mirror. Helena on the edge of the bed with her earrings. The particular comfortable noise of two people sharing a space that one of them lived in. Music on low. The window showing the city starting to go dark outside. This was t

Jordan gave Damian a dry jacket from somewhere.It did not fit. It belonged to someone on the crew and it was too wide in the shoulders and too short in the sleeve and Damian wore it anyway because the alternative was standing in his soaked jacket for the rest of the evening and he was not going to do that. He rolled the sleeves. He accepted a towel and dried his face and hair and handed it back. His trousers were still wet. His shoes were still wet. There was nothing to be done about that.The room had settled back into itself by the time he came back inside. The water incident had been absorbed the way incidents were absorbed at parties. A moment of alarm and then the collective decision to treat it as a story rather than a crisis. He heard two people already retelling it at the drinks table. Someone said he went right over. Someone else said Helena was in before anyone moved. The second person laughed. They both did.Damian got himself a drink. He stood near the window and looked a

Camila fell asleep at twelve forty.He knew because he had been lying beside her in the dark listening to her breathing change. She fell asleep the way she did everything. Efficiently. One moment present and the next not. No transition. No restlessness. Just the decision to sleep and then sleep.He waited another fifteen minutes.Then he got up and went to the study and closed the door.He did not turn on the overhead light. Just the desk lamp. He sat in the pool of it with his personal laptop and the city outside the study window going about its late night business and he opened the file.He had last added to it three days ago. He read it from the beginning the way he had started to do. Not because he forgot what was in it. Because reading it from the beginning each time told him something about the shape of it. How it was growing. Whether it was growing in the right direction.Tonight it read differently.He had been to the yacht. He had stood in a room and received congratulations

He called at eleven.Cassidy had been awake since eight. She had been at her kitchen table with her laptop doing work that she was not actually doing because she kept reading the same paragraph without taking anything in. When her phone rang and she saw his name she picked up before the second ring.He said I was thinking about last night. He said I wanted to talk through some of it if you had time today.She said yes. She said come over. She said it before she had finished the sentence which meant she had said it before she thought about it which was not how she usually operated.He said I can be there in an hour.She said okay. She said see you then. She hung up and looked at her laptop and the paragraph she had been not reading and closed it.He arrived at twelve fifteen. She had changed twice and then changed back to the first thing and told herself she was not doing that.She opened the door and he said hello and she said hello and she went to the kitchen to put the kettle on bec

Victor Ames had been in this business for nineteen years.He had started in media relations. The legitimate kind. Press releases and spokesperson preparation and crisis management for companies that had made the kind of mistakes companies made publicly. He was good at it. He understood how information moved and what made it stick and what made it disappear. He understood that the difference between a story and not a story was almost always timing and framing and who got to speak first.Somewhere around year six he had started taking a different kind of client. The kind that needed things managed that could not be put in a press release. He had told himself at the time that it was a grey area. He had been telling himself that for thirteen years.The letter arrived on a Thursday morning.He picked it up from the mat with the rest of the post. His wife was in the kitchen making breakfast. His daughters were getting ready for school upstairs. He could hear them moving around. The particul