Lahat ng Kabanata ng Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO : Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

~ Lena POV ~I hadn’t planned on going to the farmer’s market.Maya had texted at nine asking if I wanted to come, the one on the west side she’d been going to since college, good coffee and overpriced sourdough and the specific Saturday morning energy of people who had decided to be cheerful about vegetables. I’d said yes because my apartment felt small and I’d been in my own head since the garden party and sometimes the best thing for a head that won’t quiet is a crowd that isn’t paying attention to you.We were at the cheese stall when I saw him.Ryan, across the market, moving through the crowd with the particular distracted energy of someone who hadn’t come for the cheese. He was looking at his phone and then looking up and scanning, and I understood before his eyes reached me that he’d known I’d be here. Maya had a public Instagram. She’d posted the market’s location at eight forty-five with a coffee cup emoji.I filed that and decided in the two seconds before his eyes found me

He knocked at seven forty-three on a Tuesday evening.I know because I’d just looked at the clock wondering whether it was too early to go to bed, which it was, which meant I was going to spend another two hours pretending to read and actually thinking about things I’d decided not to think about. The knock was three times, unhurried, the kind of knock that wasn’t apologetic about existing.I wasn’t expecting anyone.I looked through the peephole out of habit and then stood very still for a moment on my side of the door.I opened it.Adrian was in the same jacket he’d worn to the office that morning, which meant he’d come directly from somewhere work-related and not from home, and he was holding a folder I recognised as the revised guest list amendment I’d left at Cole Industries three days ago and apparently forgotten entirely.“You left this,” he said.I looked at the folder. “I did.”“Priya noticed. She was going to courier it but I was,” he paused, something in the pause that wasn’

The gallery opening was on a Thursday.Cole Foundation sponsored it, which meant Adrian and I were expected, which meant Priya had sent a briefing three days in advance with the artist’s background, the guest list, and a note at the bottom that said simply: “High media presence. Plan accordingly.” I’d worn the black dress again, the structured one, the one that had stopped feeling like armour and started feeling like mine.The gallery was the kind of space that took itself seriously without being humourless about it, white walls and considered lighting and the particular energy of a room full of people who had opinions about art and wanted somewhere to put them. We arrived at seven. The room was already full.Adrian’s hand found the small of my back as we came through the door.I’d stopped registering the gesture three events ago. That was its own kind of information but it was information I’d filed under not tonight and left there.The first hour moved well. I knew the room better th

I didn’t confront him.I want to be clear about that, about the decision and the reasons for it, because it would be easy to frame what happened in the days after the gallery as avoidance. It wasn’t. It was something more deliberate than that.I had no proof. I had a contact name that was a single letter. I had a message preview I’d seen for less than a second. I had Vanessa’s voice at a bar and Clara’s hand at my door and the specific architecture of Adrian’s distraction assembled over ten weeks of paying careful attention. None of that was proof. All of it was instinct, and instinct without evidence was not something I was willing to carry into a conversation that could not be taken back.So I didn’t confront him.What I did instead was quieter and, I understood somewhere underneath the decision, more honest about where I actually was. I kept showing up. I kept performing. I did the events and the dinners and the coordinated press management with the same professional precision I’d

~ Adrian POV ~I knew before I got home.Not from anything specific. Just the accumulated weight of a week that had been pressing on me from too many directions at once, the foundation event and Ethan in the corner with Lena before I arrived and the look on her face when I reached them, composed and steady and just fractionally too careful in a way that had been costing me sleep for two weeks.Vanessa was on the sofa when I came in. She had her laptop open and a glass of wine beside her and the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting long enough that the waiting had become its own activity.She looked up when I closed the door.“Late,” she said.“The event ran long.” I set my jacket over the chair. “How was the magazine sitting?”“Fine. The photographer was good.” She closed her laptop. “There are photographs from tonight already. Someone with a long lens near the entrance.”I looked at her.“You and Lena are arriving,” she said. Her voice was even. “Her hand on your arm