All Chapters of CHASING HIS EX-WIFE: My ex-husband wants me-too late: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

She was still at her desk at seven forty-three PM.The office was quiet around her in the way it went quiet after everyone else had left, the particular quality of a building that had been full and was now empty, the air still carrying the faint residue of the day's activity — coffee and printer warmth and the specific low hum of computers that hadn't been shut down properly.She was supposed to be reviewing the Phase Two budget revision.She had read the same paragraph four times.She knew this because she had noticed herself reading it the second time and had made a deliberate effort to absorb it the third time and had failed and had read it a fourth time with the resigned acceptance of someone who understood that the paragraph was not the problem.The paragraph was not the problem.She closed the budget document.Opened it again.Closed it.She picked up her phone and opened the message thread with Enzo, the last message his address and the seven o'clock on the night of the dinner,

The ballroom continued its noise around them.Glasses and conversation and the particular hum of two hundred people in a room together, all of it going on with the indifferent continuity of a world that didn't know it was being held still by a look across a crowded space between two people who had signed papers four months ago and were standing on opposite ends of the same room for the first time since.Jayda felt Enzo go slightly still beside her.Not dramatically. Just the specific quality of someone who had noticed something and was processing it with the composure he brought to everything that required composure.She felt him look in the same direction she was looking.She felt him understand."Do you want to leave?" he said quietly, close enough that only she could hear it.She looked at Antonio across the ballroom. At Lisa's hand on his arm, at the possessive configuration of it, at Antonio's face which was doing the thing it did when he was feeling something he hadn't given him

He looked at Jayda first."Are you alright?" he said.The same question Enzo had asked, in the same words, but with a different quality in it, something more urgent and less contained, the question of someone who had been across a ballroom watching something happen to a person they cared about and had been unable to reach in time."I'm fine," Jayda said.He looked at her for a moment with the unmanaged version of his face, the one she had seen in Dess's living room with his coat on, the one that arrived when the management fell away and left only what was actually there.Then he looked at Enzo.The two men looked at each other.She watched it happen from the specific perspective of someone standing between two people who were each conducting a complicated and entirely wordless conversation through the medium of eye contact, and she felt the weight of everything she didn't know about that conversation sitting in the air between them like a third presence."Thank you," Antonio said.The

He guided her to the sofa and she sat and he crouched beside her at eye level and she looked at his face in the lamp light of Dess's living room, at the steadiness in it, at the absence of the expression she had been afraid of — the pity, the alarm, the specific way people looked at her when they understood she was not as fine as she presented and decided that understanding gave them permission to treat her accordingly.He didn't look at her like that.He looked at her like someone who was present and paying attention and waiting for her to tell him what she needed, and the waiting was patient and the presence was real and she felt both of those things with the tired clarity of someone who had run out of energy for pretense.Dess came back with water and paused at the doorway of the living room taking in the configuration — Jayda on the sofa, Enzo crouched beside her, the apartment charged with the specific atmosphere of an almost — and she set the water on the coffee table and said q

She pulled the investment agreement out of the bottom drawer.Not the folder. Not the governance proposals. The original document, the one she had signed when the fifteen million transferred and everything became official and real, and she opened it on the desk and read it the way she hadn't read it in weeks, not for the legal language but for the architecture of it, for the shape of what it connected and who it connected her to and what those connections looked like from the outside.Then she pulled a legal pad toward her and started writing.The Kellerman CEO was on the board of two companies that shared institutional investors with Wright Capital Group. She knew this because she had researched Wright Capital's portfolio before the signing and the information was in her notes and she had never connected it to Kellerman because she'd had no reason to connect it to Kellerman until this morning.The county permit office — she went back through her memory of the past three months, throu