All Chapters of CHASING HIS EX-WIFE: My ex-husband wants me-too late: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

The restaurant Antonio had chosen was the kind of place where the lighting was deliberately soft and the tables were spaced far enough apart that conversations stayed private and the staff moved around the room with the quiet efficiency of people who had been trained to be present without being noticed. It was the kind of place that made everything happening inside it feel important, feel considered, feel like it had been chosen rather than simply occurring, and on any other evening Lisa would have loved every carefully curated detail of it.Tonight it felt like sitting across from someone who was physically present and mentally somewhere else entirely, which was its own particular kind of frustrating when you had spent the entire afternoon engineering your way to this table.She ordered the salmon because it was what she always ordered in French restaurants, not because she particularly wanted it but because it was the kind of choice that required no deliberation and left her mental

The documents arrived at seven fifty-three AM, couriered in a leather portfolio embossed with the logo of Wright Capital Group legal firm, delivered by a young woman in a pressed blazer who smiled professionally and asked Jayda to sign for receipt with the same pen she'd use an hour later to sign away the last of her uncertainty.Jayda set the portfolio on her desk and didn't open it immediately.She stood at the window instead, watching the track crew set up for the morning's junior driver session, watching the mechanics move between the garage bays with the particular efficiency that came from years of doing the same thing the same way. Riverside Racing in motion. Riverside Racing working. The thing she'd bought and built and was now fighting to protect in whatever time she had left to fight.The fifteen million was already sitting in the company account. She'd checked three times that morning, compulsively, the way she checked her medication schedule and her oxygen levels and the s

The hospital visit took three hours.Not because anything was dramatically wrong — nothing was dramatically wrong in the way that required emergency intervention or hushed conversations between doctors outside curtained bays. Everything was wrong in the slow, steady, already-documented way that had become the baseline of Jayda's existence, the kind of wrong that got charted and noted and added to the file that was growing thicker every month.Her oxygen levels were lower than they'd been at her last check. Her lung function had declined another four percent since September. The consultant — Dr. Chen, who had the particular gentleness of someone who delivered bad news often enough to have developed a whole language around it — adjusted two of her medications and suggested, again, that she consider reducing her workload.Jayda said she'd think about it.Dr. Chen wrote something in the file that was probably patient non-compliant or the medical equivalent, and sent her home with new pres

She stared at the note for forty minutes before she did anything about it.Not because she didn't know what she was going to do — she'd known within thirty seconds of reading it the first time, had known with the same quiet certainty she brought to most decisions that mattered. The forty minutes were not indecision. They were something closer to allowing herself to sit with a thing before she closed it, the way she sometimes sat with the last page of a good report before filing it, acknowledging that it existed before moving on.The flowers were still beautiful.That hadn't changed.She pulled up a new email at ten forty-three, addressed it to the account his correspondence always came from, and wrote three sentences.Mr. Vitale,Thank you for the flowers and the kind thought. I'm feeling much better. I'll have to decline the dinner invitation — I have a full schedule over the coming weeks as we move into Phase One implementation, but I appreciate the gesture.Jayda MarloweShe read i

The knock came at exactly eight forty-three.Dess heard it from the kitchen where she was washing the dinner plates, the sound cutting through the low hum of the television Jayda had left on in the living room before retreating to her bedroom an hour ago.She dried her hands.Walked to the door.Opened it.And felt everything in her go very still.Antonio Moretti stood in the hallway looking exactly like the photographs she had spent considerable energy not looking at for the past year and a half. Tall. Dark. The kind of composed that cost something to maintain. He was in a dark coat, no tie, the top button of his shirt open in the way that meant he had come from somewhere formal and loosened himself in the car on the way here.He looked tired.She didn't care."Dess," he said."No," she said.He blinked. "I need to—""I heard you." She didn't move from the doorway. Didn't shift an inch. "And I said no."Antonio looked at her steadily. "I need to speak with Jayda.""Jayda doesn't need