Lahat ng Kabanata ng His Billion-Dollar Regret: The Forgotten Wife Returns: Kabanata 261 - Kabanata 270

Regina hadn't touched the water.She'd been sitting in Dr. Chen's office for four minutes and the glass was exactly where the assistant had placed it — untouched, sweating in the afternoon warmth.She'd arrived already crying. That wasn't her usual way into a session. She was composed. Measured. Precise. She'd spent ten years building those qualities into her default setting.This week had stripped all of it back to nothing."He thinks he was bought," she said. "My son. He sat in front of me and said 'I was bought, like at the pet shop when people buy a puppy.' He said that."Dr. Chen gave her silence. Not uncomfortable silence — the kind that meant: keep going."He's ten years old. He shouldn't know what that means. He shouldn't have a framework for that conversation. But he does, because I made choices before he was born that made it necessary.""Which choices?" Dr. Chen asked.Regina looked at her hands. "Do you want the list in chronological order or order of damage done?""Whiche

Ethan picked the park.Not the one near Lewis's house, not the one near Regina's. A different park entirely — one they'd never been to before, one that didn't belong to either version of his life.He asked Regina to come alone. No David.She arrived first and was sitting on a bench when he came through the gate, hands in the pocket of his school jacket, the one with the team badge on the sleeve he'd been wearing for two weeks straight.He sat down next to her.Not far away. Next to her."You wanted to talk," she said."Yeah."She didn't rush him. That was the one thing she'd learned to do right — not fill his silences before he was done with them.He looked straight ahead at the empty football pitch. A crow was walking across the penalty area with no particular urgency."I went back to see Dr. Morrison," he said."She asked me to do something. She asked me to write down the thing I was most angry about. One sentence.""What did you write?"Ethan pulled a folded piece of paper from his

The call came from school at 10:47 on a Tuesday morning.Lewis was in a meeting. Yessica took it.Mrs. Henderson, Claire's school guidance counsellor, spoke in the measured tone of someone who had handled these conversations many times and understood that the first sixty seconds mattered. "There was an incident in health class this morning. Claire isn't in trouble. But I'd like both of you to come in this afternoon if possible."They came in at three.The office was small and institutional — one window, two chairs angled toward Mrs. Henderson's desk, a bookshelf with the kind of titles that signal a person who thinks carefully about adolescent development."During a lesson on family structures and relationships," Mrs. Henderson said, "Claire challenged the teacher's use of the term 'broken families.' She argued that the framing was reductive. She asked whether children of divorce were statistically more likely to develop anxiety around their own relationships." She paused. "Then she b

The Q1 board meeting was scheduled for nine in the morning.Lewis arrived at eight-fifteen.He spent forty-five minutes alone in the conference room with the documents, the transition framework, and a coffee that went cold while he read through every page one final time. Not because he'd changed his mind. Because once this announcement was made, there was no version of the next five years that looked like the one before it.Marcus arrived at eight-fifty. He set down his folder, looked at Lewis, and said nothing.Lewis looked back."Ready?" Marcus asked."Yes.""Any nerves?"Lewis considered it honestly. "No."Marcus sat down. "That either means you're completely certain or completely past the point where nerves are useful.""Both," Lewis said.The board filed in at nine on the dot. Hargreaves. Thornton. Peyton. The external advisors. Vance, who came in last, read the room with the particular sharpness of someone who had learned from the previous session to walk in already watching.Ha

Lewis didn't tell Yessica about the letter that morning.He told himself he was waiting for the right moment. The truth was he didn't know how to say it out loud yet. That a woman who had never spoken a word to his daughter had written her a letter sealed in Eleanor's office, addressed to Claire Sterling, to be opened at eighteen.Claire was seventeen. Her birthday was in six months.He sat with that all day.***Yessica found him in the study at half past nine that evening, still at his desk, laptop closed, not working.She stood in the doorway and looked at him."What is it?" she asked.He turned around. "Close the door."She closed the door and sat in the chair across from the desk — the chair that had seen every difficult conversation in this house for the last decade. She looked at him steadily, waiting."Eleanor called this morning," he said. "About Catherine's estate. The trust funds are being processed. Standard administrative items.""But?""But she also told me Catherine lef