Semua Bab His Billion-Dollar Regret: The Forgotten Wife Returns: Bab 61 - Bab 70

POV: Yessica | Location: EdinburghShe read it twice.The streetlamp threw pale light across the screen, the Edinburgh cold pressing through her coat into the back of her neck. Lewis's message sat on the screen like something that had been waiting a long time for permission to arrive.I spent two years in therapy learning the difference between wanting you back and deserving the chance. I'm not asking you to trust that yet. I'm asking you to let me prove it's not the same thing.She put the phone in her pocket and walked home.Pippa was on the sofa with her shoes off when Yessica came in, the corner lamp on, the flat quiet the way it got after both girls were down."Well," Pippa said. Not a question."He was early." Yessica dropped her bag on the chair. "He listened — not the waiting-to-speak kind. And then he sent something when I was walking home."She held out the phone.Pippa read it. Four seconds of silence, which for Pippa was a significant duration. "That's not a tactic," she s

POV: Yessica | Location: EdinburghShe answered on the second ring.Not because she was ready. Because standing in the Edinburgh kitchen watching a phone ring while Pippa stared at her from across the counter was not a sustainable position."What did you send him?" Pippa said, in a whisper, exactly as Yessica pressed the phone to her ear.She held up one finger."Yessica." Lewis's voice. Not a greeting. Just her name, the way he said it when something mattered — short, level, the version that didn't perform calm but was calm."Yes," she said.A pause. "You said yes, it's worth knowing you.""That's what I sent."Another pause. Longer. She could hear him breathing — the specific quality of a man who had been sitting with a phone in his hand and was now recalibrating everything he had prepared to say. "I wasn't expecting that," he said."I know.""I had three responses ready. For various versions of what you might say.""Which one covers this?""None of them." A beat. "I didn't write on

POV: Yessica | Location: EdinburghHe knocked at exactly seven.Yessica opened the door and said nothing. Lewis looked like a man who had spent the afternoon holding a number he wasn't ready to say out loud. She stepped aside. He came in.She had not tidied beyond the ordinary. The flat looked like what it was. She had decided, somewhere between the phone call and now, that she was not going to soften the evidence for his comfort.He sat on the sofa. She sat in the chair across from him."Tell me," he said.She told him the structural version.Rose was ten weeks old. Conceived the last month of their marriage. She'd found out six weeks after filing. She had made the decision at the Royal Infirmary — she was not going to tell Lewis until she knew whether the man who showed up in Edinburgh was worth building around.No softening. No apology.Lewis sat very still through all of it. When she finished, the only sound in the flat was the baby monitor on the side table — soft static, small e

POV: Yessica | Location: EdinburghShe put the phone down and looked at the clock.Eight fifty-one.One hour meant Lewis had until nine fifty-one to call Harrison and tell him about Rose before a legal inquiry returned the information without context, without framing, without anything Yessica could control.Claire finished her toast and carried her plate to the sink the way Yessica had taught her — both hands, slow, set it down don't drop it. Then she looked at her mother with the four-year-old version of the Theron assessment."Is Lewis coming today?" she said."Not today.""Tomorrow?""I don't know yet, Claire."Claire accepted this with the patience of a child who had learned that some adult answers were genuinely incomplete and not evasions. She went to her room. Yessica picked up Rose from the bouncy seat and stood at the kitchen window.The Edinburgh Monday below. Ordinary and indifferent.She had one hour to wait.She had never been good at waiting.Lewis called at nine thirty-

POV: Yessica | Location: EdinburghLewis watched her type.He didn't ask what she was writing. He sat in the chair with his hands loose on his knees and watched her work and said nothing, which was the correct response and she noted it.The message to the Edinburgh Chronicle editor took four minutes. She had met James Alderton twice at Bellamy Holdings industry events — enough for him to know her name, not enough for him to have any obligation to her.She was not calling in a favor. She was offering him a story that was better than the one he was about to be second on.She read it once and sent it."What did you say," Lewis said."That Yessica Hart-Sterling, founder of Bellamy Holdings Edinburgh, confirms she and Lewis Sterling are in contact following their divorce, that a family law application filed by Harrison Sterling has been withdrawn by mutual agreement, and that any further speculation about their family is unwelcome and will not be engaged with." She put the phone down. "Thr