All Chapters of CHASING HIS EX-WIFE: My ex-husband wants me-too late: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

The six days passed the way the days before something important always passed — faster than ordinary days and slower than she wanted them to, the hours alternating between the focused efficiency of preparation and the particular heaviness of waiting for a thing you had prepared for as thoroughly as preparation allowed and now simply had to arrive.Monday evening she sat at the kitchen table with the finalized response document and read it one last time, not looking for things to change because the time for changing was past, but the way she read race data the night before a qualifying session — not to find new information but to consolidate what she already knew, to move it from the part of her mind that was still processing into the part that was ready to act.It was good.Forty-three pages of clean, legally sound, thoroughly justified governance responses that gave Enzo everything he could reasonably claim as his right as a minority investor and nothing he had been building toward f

Enzo looked at her for a moment.Then he said, "I don't know where to start.""That's unusual for you," Jayda said."Yes," he agreed. "It is."The coffee sat between them, untouched on both sides, and the grey October light held steady through the conference room window and the building around them was quiet in the way it went quiet after the morning session finished and before the afternoon one began, the specific interim quiet of a place that was resting between its own rhythms."Start wherever it's true," she said.He looked at her with the unguarded version of his face, the one she had catalogued now across enough moments to recognize it as the real one, the one that arrived when he had stopped calculating and was simply present in whatever was happening."I didn't expect you," he said."You spent fourteen months positioning yourself around my company," she said evenly. "I think you expected me fairly thoroughly.""I expected Riverside Racing," he said. "I expected a founder. I ex

The knock came at ten past nine on Wednesday morning.Jayda was in the kitchen in her pajamas with her second coffee and the Phase Two preliminary budget she had been staring at for twenty minutes without actually reading, her hair in the particular state of someone who had slept well and had not yet done anything about the evidence of it, and Dess was somewhere in the apartment doing something that involved opening and closing drawers with great conviction.The knock was loud.Not aggressive — enthusiastic. The knock of someone who had a significant amount of feeling about being on the other side of a door and was communicating all of it through their knuckles."I'll get it," Dess called."It's your apartment," Jayda called back.She heard the door open.Then she heard Dess say, in the specific tone of someone who had opened a door and found something they had not anticipated, "Oh. Hello."Then she heard a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a sob and unmistakably, entirely,

Thursday arrived with the kind of morning that couldn't decide what it wanted to be — not quite cold enough for the heavy coat, not quite warm enough to leave it behind, the sky doing something noncommittal between grey and blue that Jayda stood at the window looking at for a full minute before deciding on the coat and moving on with her life.She had not yet responded to Enzo's dinner suggestion.Not because she had decided against it. Not because she had decided for it. But because the board meeting and its aftermath and Margaret's arrival the following day had filled the available space in her head with enough competing content that the dinner question had been set aside in the particular way of things you intend to return to and haven't yet.She was aware she was going to have to return to it today.She was aware that not responding was itself a response and that she had given it long enough.She was making coffee and constructing a position on the dinner question when her phone s

She left the office at six twenty-two.Later than she had planned, which was the fault of the Phase Two budget that kept presenting new problems every time she solved an existing one, and not at all because she had been using the budget as a reason to stay at her desk rather than go home and face the getting-ready process and everything the getting-ready process implied about how much this evening meant to her.That was not what was happening.She closed the laptop with more firmness than was strictly necessary and said goodnight to Mara who had been waiting with the particular patience of someone whose boss had not yet left and who was too professional to mention it."Goodnight," Mara said, with no expression whatsoever."Not a word," Jayda said."I haven't said anything," Mara said."You were about to.""I really wasn't," Mara said, and went back to her screen with the serenity of someone who had been saying nothing all along.She changed twice.The first outfit was too formal, carr