บททั้งหมดของ UNTIL YOU REMEMBER ME: บทที่ 201 - บทที่ 210

Victor’s silence finally broke on the tenth day. It did not break with a roar, or a public spectacle, or the theatrical fury the media had been anticipating since the scandal first fractured the city’s upper crust. Instead, it arrived with a single, precise move—the kind of quiet, devastating maneuver that had made him a legend in the corporate courtrooms long before he became our personal tormentor. A new filing appeared in the electronic court docket late that morning, a sterile notification flashing across my laptop screen. It was a motion for an independent psychiatric evaluation of all parties involved in the original case, explicitly naming both Adrian and me. The filing cited ongoing concerns about manipulated testimony, severe emotional trauma, and psychological coercion. It was signed by one of Victor’s few remaining attorneys—a man whose career was too tied to Victor’s empire to jump ship now—but the language carried Victor’s signature restraint.He wasn’t attacking our char


 (Alessa) Kathryn Schmidt moved faster than we expected. By morning, she had issued a public statement. It was carefully worded, professional, and devastating in its subtlety. She called for “an impartial review of the Reyes Holdings matter to ensure no miscarriage of justice occurred due to personal or familial influence.” She never mentioned Margaret by name, but everyone understood. The Attorney General of New York was openly shielding her cousin. I read the statement on my tablet while standing at the window, the morning light cold against my skin. The silk robe felt too light, too fragile. My body still carried the warmth of Adrian from the night before — the slow, deliberate way he had held me, the quiet intensity of our connection that had become our only constant. Even now, fear twisting in my chest, I felt that low, aching pull toward him. I wanted his hands again. His certainty. His voice grounding me. Adrian came up behind me, arms wrapping around my waist, pulling me


 ( Alessa) The call from Kathryn lingered like smoke long after Adrian hung up. I couldn’t sit still. While he took a call with legal counsel in the study, I found myself walking down the hallway toward the small storage room we rarely opened. The past felt too close tonight. Kathryn’s voice — smooth, familiar, laced with old intimacy — had cracked something open inside me. I pulled open the built-in locker Adrian used for old law school files and personal archives. Dust motes danced in the low light. My fingers brushed across old binders, then stopped on a small, unmarked wooden box tucked at the back. I shouldn’t have opened it. Inside were keepsakes I had never seen. A faded law school debate trophy with both their names engraved. A handwritten note on heavy cream paper: “You were brilliant today, even when you were wrong. Dinner at 8? — K.” Several photographs — Kathryn and Adrian at law school events, laughing, standing too close. One showed her leaning into him, her hand


 (Adrian) I’ve always hated suspicious women. Back in law school, it was one of the few things Kathryn and I agreed on. We used to mock the ones who checked phones, read old messages, and turned every unanswered text into evidence of betrayal. I told her once, over cheap campus coffee, that suspicion was the fastest way to kill something real. She had laughed and said I was too arrogant to ever be on the receiving end of it. Funny how life circles back. I stood in the doorway of our bedroom watching Alessa pretend to read a brief she wasn’t actually seeing. Her shoulders were tight. The silk robe she wore — the one I loved sliding off her — looked more like armor tonight. Something had shifted in her these past days. She was digging. Checking my phone when she thought I wasn’t looking. Asking questions wrapped in soft kisses. I didn’t know why. I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Alessa.” She looked up. Her eyes were guarded in a way that twisted something dee


 ( Alessa) The drive upstate to my father’s estate felt like running away and walking into a trap at the same time. Eduardo Valez was waiting on the wide stone steps when the car pulled up. The moment I stepped out with my suitcase, his face shifted from warm welcome to sharp concern. He had always been able to read me — even when my memory had been a blank slate. “Alessa,” he said, voice low and careful. “You didn’t say you were coming for a week. You just said you were coming.” I hugged him tightly, breathing in the familiar scent of cedar and old books. “I needed air, Papa. Real air. Not the kind that smells like glass towers and lies.” He didn’t press. That was the thing about my father — he never dug where it would hurt unless I invited him. Instead he took my suitcase and led me inside the sprawling Hudson Valley house that had once felt like a fortress. Over coffee in the sunlit conservatory, he studied me the way only a father who had lost one daughter to erasure could