All Chapters of My Husband Brought Another Woman, I Chose His Best Friend : Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

The office had emptied out early that evening, most people gone by six, and I lingered a little longer than usual finishing a report before heading down to the parking garage, my mind still half on numbers and deadlines rather than anything happening around me. The building had that particular hollow quiet it got after hours, elevators humming down empty shafts, the cleaning crew's cart squeaking somewhere on another floor.The evening air was cool when I finally stepped outside, the kind of early autumn chill that made me wish I'd grabbed my jacket from my desk instead of leaving it draped over my chair. I pulled out my phone to text Liam that I was heading out, my eyes more on the screen than on the street around me, typing out something ordinary about picking up dinner on my way home.Something made me look up.Across the street, half hidden by the awning of a closed bookstore, a man stood watching the building. Ordinary looking at first glance, hands in his pockets, nothing about

I spent the entire day rehearsing how to tell him, different versions playing out in my head between meetings, none of them landing quite right by the time I actually had to say the words out loud, sitting across from him in our own kitchen.Part of me wanted to wait. Liam already had Renfrew's lawsuit, the board tension with Marcus Webb, the ongoing fallout from Meridian all sitting heavy on him week after week, and some old instinct in me still wanted to protect him from one more thing, to carry this quietly the way I might have once carried something alone without telling anyone at all, the way I'd been trained to by years of managing myself around other people's crises.But I thought about what I'd told him on that balcony weeks ago, about not disappearing, about naming things out loud instead of managing them silently and letting them fester unseen. I thought about Ferris's voice on the phone that morning, careful and direct, cutting through my hesitation. Waiting to see what hap

Neither of us moved for a long moment after I said it, the words still hanging in the kitchen between us, heavier than either of us seemed to know how to handle right then.Liam finally sat back down, slower this time, his hands folded in front of him instead of reaching for his phone, some of the earlier urgency drained out of him entirely, replaced by something quieter and more careful."Tell me," he said quietly. "All of it. Not the version you've given me before, the short one. The real one, whatever that costs you to say out loud."I hesitated, old habits telling me to keep it small, manageable, the way I'd learned to package it for people over the years so it wouldn't feel as heavy in the room as it actually was, so it wouldn't require anyone else to sit with the full weight of it."I told you he cheated on me," I said slowly. "That part's true. But it wasn't really about the cheating, in the end, not the way you'd think. That was just the thing that finally made me leave, the v

Lunch with Amy had been easy in a way I badly needed, an hour of ordinary conversation about her weekend, her upcoming vacation plans, nothing to do with Kevin or the board or any of the last few stressful weeks at all. We'd sat outside at a small café, the kind with mismatched chairs and a waitress who knew Amy's usual order by heart, and for that hour, I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to carry the weight of everything else waiting for me back home."You seem lighter today," Amy said, hugging me goodbye outside the restaurant, pulling back to study my face with real affection. "Whatever you and Liam worked out, it's showing on you.""We're working on it," I said, smiling despite everything. "One conversation at a time, apparently.""That's usually how the good ones actually work, in my experience," Amy said, squeezing my arm before heading toward the subway entrance down the block. "Text me when you're home safe, okay?""I will, I promise."I started walking the six blocks back

Six weeks had passed since the crosswalk, and life had finally settled into something that felt almost ordinary again, the sharp edges of that afternoon slowly softening into something more like memory than fear, the way even the worst things eventually do if given enough time and enough ordinary days stacked one after another. Kevin's warrant remained outstanding, but he'd apparently left the city not long after that afternoon, and nobody had seen or heard from him since, not a single sighting, not a single flicker of activity on any of the accounts Ferris kept quietly monitoring. I checked in with the precinct every couple of weeks out of habit more than necessity at this point, and each time the answer was the same. No sightings. No activity. Nothing at all to report.I'd stopped flinching at strangers on the street. I'd stopped scanning crosswalks before I crossed them, my body slowly unlearning the vigilance it had built up over those tense weeks without me even fully noticing th