บททั้งหมดของ His Billion-Dollar Regret: The Forgotten Wife Returns: บทที่ 291 - บทที่ 300

[POV: Lewis] [Location: Edinburgh — Kitchen]He read the first page standing up.Then he sat down and read it again.Eleanor's covering letter was two paragraphs. Formal, precise, the language of legal finality. The estate of Harrison James Sterling had been fully administered. All prior distributions had been executed. The remaining item, held in trust pending family notification, was now being formally released.He turned to the attached document.It was a letter. Handwritten, two pages, dated eight months before Harrison had died.He recognized the handwriting — slower than Harrison's earlier years, the letters requiring more effort, but unmistakably his.Yessica sat beside him and they read it together.Harrison had written to each grandchild individually. Not in separate letters — in one document, addressed to each of them in turn, the way someone writes when they know they're running out of time and want to be efficient with what remains.To Claire first. Precise, proud, specif

[POV: Lewis] [Location: Edinburgh — Kitchen]Yessica came downstairs in thirty seconds.She saw his face and sat across from him without asking questions. The letter was on the table between them, one page, unfolded."Read it," he said.She picked it up.Lewis watched her read. He'd already read it twice. He knew which line had made him call for her — he could track it now on her face as she reached it.Her expression shifted.She finished. Set it down carefully."She knew," Yessica said."She knew."Catherine's letter had started with what he'd expected — a final accounting, the kind a person produces when they understand they're out of time. She'd written: I am not asking for forgiveness. I have asked for that before and I understand what it is and isn't. This is not that.Then she'd written the thing he hadn't expected.She'd written about Lewis's childhood. Not the version he knew — not the managed, curated version she'd presented when he was young, the narrative of a devoted mot

[POV: Yessica] [Location: Scottish Borders — Small Hotel]The hotel was forty minutes outside Edinburgh.Stone walls, six rooms, a kitchen garden visible from the window of their room. The owner had met them at the door and shown them around in ten minutes and then left them entirely alone, which was exactly what Yessica had wanted without knowing how to ask for it.No itinerary. No schedule.Lewis had brought one book and hadn't opened it.Yessica had brought her work laptop and left it in the bag.They walked on the first afternoon along a path that followed a river she didn't know the name of and didn't look up. Lewis walked beside her and occasionally said something and she responded and the conversation was the unhurried kind that required nothing from either of them — not resolution, not decision, not management of anyone else's state.Dinner at the hotel's only table, served at seven. A simple menu, good wine, the particular pleasure of a meal that required no choices about ch

[POV: Lewis] [Location: Edinburgh — Home / Study]He didn't sleep well.Not badly — just lightly, in the way of someone whose mind was still running through something and hadn't decided to stop.The recordings.He'd grown up in a house where Catherine controlled everything, including what was kept and what was discarded. She'd been systematic about it. After the divorce, after the conviction, after every stage of her removal from his life, he'd assumed the past was gone with her. Not just her presence — the evidence of it. The physical record.She'd kept recordings of his voice. From when he was small.He didn't know how to feel about that. He was still working it out.At six in the morning he got up and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with a blank notepad, which was what he did when he needed to think without direction.He wrote one line: She remembered what she had before she destroyed it.He looked at it for a while.Then he turned the page.Eleanor called at nine with th

[POV: Yessica] [Location: Edinburgh — Home]The tree was Rose's project this year.She'd announced it in October, two weeks after the twins news had made its way through the family, with the tone of someone proposing a solution to a problem that hadn't been identified yet. Someone needs to do the tree properly this year, she'd said, and nobody had argued, and she'd spent the following six weeks occasionally sending links to things she intended to acquire.The result was better than any tree the house had seen.Not because it was elaborate — it wasn't. It was thoughtful. Each ornament had a reason to be there that Rose could explain if asked. The lights were warm rather than cool because Ethan had said cool lights looked like a crime scene and Rose had agreed with the dignity of someone whose opinion had been validated. The star at the top was Grace's — the paper one she'd made at age six that had survived five years of storage in a box that had clearly been dropped at least twice.Gr