She Was Never Just the Billionaire’s Wife のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 221 - チャプター 230

(Natasha)The laugh reaches me before I'm through the door.It's a good laugh.Low, unhurried, the laugh of a woman who finds Mason funny and isn't faking it.He's at the whiteboard with a marker, mid-sentence, pleased with himself in the specific way he gets when somebody's actually keeping up.Imani Okafor is in my chair.She's been across the table from us on the Brennan project for two weeks.She’s a partner at the firm on the other side.In her early thirties, with that put-together look that pretends it isn't effort.She argues with Mason like it's a sport they both signed up for, and he's stopped rolling his sleeves down between sessions, which tells me everything I didn't ask to know."Morning," I say, and take the chair at the end. Not my chair. A chair."Natasha." Imani's nod is warm and exactly professional."Mason's been walking me off a cliff on the earn-out.""He does that."I open the model.The earn-out's wrong anyway.Their number assumes a ramp that won't survive con

(Natasha)Sarah has Lily fed, bathed, and in her cot with a bottle by seven.I’ve spent forty minutes trying on and discarding outfits and I’m furious about it.I’m currently in a dress.It's a good dress.Dark green. One Gloria made me buy and I never wear.The problem isn't the dress.The problem is I keep checking the mirror like a teenager, and I'm twenty-seven, and this is my husband.The man I share a kid and a marriage certificate with and not much else before recently.I've worn his sweatshirts to bed for months.He's seen me at four in the morning with spit-up on my collarbone.Now I'm doing my eyeliner twice because he booked a table.Ridiculous.The buzzer goes at five to eight. He's early. Of course.I open the door and forget the next part of the sentence.He shaved.He's in the charcoal jacket.The one I told him once, months ago, offhand, that I liked. I didn't think he'd even heard me.Obviously he logged it."Hi," he says, looking at me in a way that’s doing very swoo

(Natasha)I hang up on my brother and stand in the kitchen crying, which I did not plan to do.It's not even sad crying.That's the part that gets me.Nathanial said she said yes and something in my chest just gave out, fast, before I could catch myself.I'm leaking all over my shirt over a pad thai proposal.Lily's on the rug going at a board book with real commitment, gumming the corner, narrating.When my voice cracked on the phone she stopped.Went still.Looked up at me with those serious eyes, book forgotten, like she was checking whether this was the kind of crying she should be worried about."I'm okay, baby. Happy. It's the happy kind."She watches me another second.Decides I'm fine.Goes back to destroying the book.I wipe my face on my sleeve and I'm reaching for my phone without even thinking about it.That's the part I notice.A month ago, I wouldn’t have done this.I’d have banked it and told Chase in passing, days later, nonchalantly, across a custody handoff.Oh, by t

(Natasha)We run out of things to say around midnight, which is when the trouble starts.The talking was safe.Talking was a job I knew how to do.Ask him a question, listen, give him something back, keep my hands wrapped around the glass.As long as we were talking I could pretend the bed wasn't sitting right there behind us, warm and made and waiting invitingly.The only flat surface in this whole freezing cabin that wasn't the floor.Then the wine's gone, and the fire's low, and he says, "We should sleep,” in that calm way he has, and there's nowhere left to put the night.I get in first.Fully clothed, which is its own small humiliation, leggings and a sweater and socks, like a teenager at a sleepover terrified of her own body.I take the far edge.I leave a canyon between us.A foot of cold sheet, maybe more, the demilitarized zone.I lie on my side facing away from him with my spine very straight and my breathing very even and I think, this is fine, this is nothing, you've share

(Mason)It's nine-forty on a Wednesday evening and Imani Okafor is destroying one of my positions on the whiteboard, and I'm letting her.Both because she's right and because watching her be right is the best part of my week so far.That's a grim sentence about a man's week. I'm aware.We've been at it since six.The Brennan thing's a mess.Two companies that both think they're the prize, lawyers stacked up on either side like it's a hostage exchange.She's on the other side of it.Technically we're enemies.Her client wants what my client wants and we’re being paid to disagree about who gets to keep their own name on the door.The funny part is she's the only person in the building I actually want to talk to right now.I love Natasha, but she sees too much and asks pointed questions that force me to examine my feelings.Nathaniel and Gloria are so obviously happy and in love it’s disturbing."Your number's fantasy," she says, capping and uncapping the marker, which she does when she'