All Chapters of CHASING HIS EX-WIFE: My ex-husband wants me-too late: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

She didn't sleep.Not really.She read the folder twice, cover to cover, and then sat with it closed on her lap in the dark of her room for a long time, turning the information over the way she turned race data over after a bad qualifying session — not with panic, but with the focused attention of someone looking for the thing they missed the first time around, the detail that changed the shape of everything else.The folder wasn't thin.Vincent was thorough. She'd give Antonio that — the man he trusted with work that mattered knew how to work.But it wasn't what she'd expected either.She had braced for something catastrophic, for evidence of something criminal, something that would require immediate action and make the past weeks feel like standing at the edge of a cliff she hadn't known was there, something that would demand a response she didn't yet have the strength for.It wasn't that.It was quieter than that, and somehow quieter was worse.She was at the kitchen table by five

"There was a financial advisor," he said carefully. "Someone I brought in during the transition period to help structure the sale terms. He was recommended to me by a contact I trusted and he seemed competent and his advice was sound, and I had no reason to question his involvement at the time." He stopped. "Looking back at the timeline now, the early inquiries began approximately three weeks after I first engaged him."Jayda looked at him steadily. "You think he was feeding information to whoever was watching.""I think it's possible," Lucas said, with the precision of a man who understood the difference between suspicion and fact and was not going to blur that line even in a private conversation. "I haven't been able to confirm anything and I want to be clear about that. But the timing is close enough that I've been sitting with the discomfort of it since you first started telling me something felt wrong about Enzo and his interest in Riverside Racing."She nodded slowly, fitting it

They finished lunch with the easy conversation of two people who were both performing something and both aware, at some level, that the other was performing, and the awareness sat between them like a third presence at the table that neither of them acknowledged directly.When he stood to leave he gathered the containers with the same unhurried efficiency with which he'd unpacked them, and she walked him to the door of her office and they shook hands at the threshold with the professional courtesy of a board member and a company owner concluding an informal check-in.At the door he paused.Turned back to her with the particular quality of pause she had learned preceded something he had been waiting for the right moment to offer."The invitation," he said simply. Not pressuring. Not retreating. Just placing it in the air between them the way he placed everything — with a patience that had fourteen months of practice behind it.She looked at him and thought about the folder in the desk d

She called him on a Tuesday.Not because Tuesday meant anything particular, not because she had planned it for that specific day or built toward it with deliberate intention, but because she had spent four days since the unannounced lunch turning the decision over with the same focused attention she gave to things that required it and by Tuesday morning she had arrived at the same place she kept arriving at no matter which direction she approached it from.She wanted to go.Not because it was strategic and not because keeping him close was the smartest way to watch him and not because Dess was right or Lucas was right or any of the voices that had been offering her perspectives on Enzo Vitale for weeks were right. Because she wanted to, and that was the whole of it, and she had decided sometime before dawn on Tuesday that the honest thing — the thing that respected the limited inventory of her time in a way that all her careful management sometimes failed to — was to stop dressing the

They talked for another hour about other things, easier things, the conversation finding its way back to lighter ground with the naturalness of water finding its level, and Jayda found herself laughing genuinely twice, which she noted with the quiet surprise of someone who had not expected to laugh tonight and was glad to have been wrong about that.He was funny in the dry understated way of someone who didn't perform humor but simply had it, who said things that were true in angles that made them suddenly absurd, and she found that harder to hold at arm's length than she had anticipated because genuine humor required genuine intelligence and she had always responded to intelligence in spite of herself.By the time they finished dessert she was aware of two things simultaneously — that she had enjoyed this evening more than she had planned to and that she had given him nothing he could use, nothing personal or vulnerable or revealing, had received his honesty without offering her own