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All Chapters of My Husband Brought Another Woman, I Chose His Best Friend : Chapter 211 - Chapter 220

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Chapter 210

Liam called outside counsel first thing that morning and told them he wanted to see Drew in person before anything else moved forward. They pushed back hard, warning him it could compromise the case if he said the wrong thing without a lawyer present, but he wouldn't budge no matter how many times they repeated it. He needed to hear it from Drew directly, not filtered through depositions and paperwork months from now."You don't have to do this," I said, watching him knot his tie in the mirror with more force than the fabric needed."Yes, I do." He met my eyes in the reflection instead of turning around. "I've spent my whole life not asking the hard questions in this family. I'm done with that.""What if he doesn't admit anything?""Then at least I'll have looked him in the eye and asked." He finished the knot and let his hands fall to his sides. "That has to count for something.""And if he does admit it? What then?""Then we'll know exactly what we're dealing with, instead of guessi

Chapter 211

Patricia listened to the recording twice before she said anything, her face unreadable the whole time, her pen resting untouched beside a legal pad full of notes she hadn't written a single word on. When she finally looked up she told Liam it was usable, clean enough to stand on its own without much interpretation needed, the kind of evidence that juries and boards alike tended to trust because it came straight from the source."This should end it," Liam said, sitting across from her desk with his hands folded tightly in his lap. "A full confession, in his own words, no ambiguity left for anyone to argue with.""It should," Patricia said, though something in the way she said it made me sit up straighter in my chair. "But boards don't always vote on evidence, Liam. Sometimes they vote on fear, and fear doesn't care how clean your recording is.""Meaning what?" Liam's voice had an edge to it now, the patience of the last few days wearing thin."Meaning Drew hasn't been sitting still thi

Chapter 212

The vote passed seven to four, with Grant's abstention hanging over the room like something nobody wanted to acknowledge directly, a silence within the silence. Marcus read the result out loud in a voice that tried to sound neutral and mostly succeeded, announcing that Liam would be suspended from his role as CEO effective immediately, pending the outcome of the independent investigation the board had just authorized by the same narrow margin.Liam sat very still through the reading, his hands flat on the table, his face giving away almost nothing to the room full of people watching him for a reaction. I wanted to reach for him, but the distance between my chair and his felt suddenly enormous, like the room itself had rearranged its geometry just to keep us apart at the exact moment we needed each other most."You have until the end of the day to clear anything personal from your office," Marcus said, not unkindly, which somehow made it worse than if he had been cruel about it. "Secur

Chapter 213

The days after the suspension settled into a pattern I didn't like. Liam wasn't disappearing into work the way he had during the earlier crises, the ones where he buried himself in spreadsheets and calls until two in the morning just to avoid sitting with his own feelings. This was quieter than that, and somehow worse. He sat in the apartment for long stretches without speaking, staring at nothing in particular, the television off, his phone left untouched on the coffee table for hours at a time. When I asked what he was thinking about he mostly just shook his head and said it didn't matter, and I learned quickly not to push past that answer too hard, too fast."You need to eat something," I said on the third morning, setting a plate down in front of him that he hadn't asked for and probably wouldn't touch."I'm not hungry.""You said that yesterday too.""I meant it yesterday too." He pushed the plate an inch away from him without looking at it, his eyes fixed somewhere past my shoul

Chapter 214

Patricia arrived at the apartment on a Tuesday morning without calling ahead first, which told me before she even said a word that something had shifted again. She had a folder tucked under her arm and an expression I hadn't seen from her before, something closer to urgency than her usual careful calm, her coat still buttoned like she hadn't planned to stay long enough to take it off."You should sit down," she said to Liam, who was still in the same chair he'd been sitting in for most of the past week, though for the first time in days he actually looked up when she spoke instead of past her."Just tell me," he said."The regulators are involved now. Independently. Not through us, not through anything we filed on your behalf."Liam sat up straighter, his eyes sharpening for the first time in days, the fog that had settled over him seeming to lift by degrees as she spoke. "Involved how?""The financial trail we traced back to Drew went wider than we expected. Wide enough that it caugh

Chapter 215

Grant came to the apartment three times that week, always in the evening, always with a short list of names written on a folded piece of paper he kept in his jacket pocket like something he didn't trust to memory alone. He and Liam sat at the kitchen table for hours going through each name, weighing who might be persuaded and who was already lost to Marcus for good, crossing names off one by one as the picture sharpened."Sarah Kim is still undecided," Grant said one night, tapping her name on the list with two fingers. "She voted with Marcus, but she's been quiet since the regulator news broke. That kind of quiet usually means she's rethinking something.""And the other two who abstained besides you?" Liam asked, leaning forward over his coffee."One of them will follow whatever Sarah does, once she moves. The other is harder to read. He doesn't like being seen changing his mind in public, so any approach has to feel private, not political, or he'll dig in out of pride alone.""Then

Chapter 216

We didn't have to wait long to find out what Patricia's call had meant.By the next morning, a story had broken across three different outlets within an hour of each other, the timing too clean to be coincidental, too neatly stacked to be anything but planned. I saw the first headline on my phone before I'd even finished my coffee, and the words hit me like a slap before I fully understood the shape of them, before my brain had even caught up to what I was reading."Nina," Liam said, watching my face change as I scrolled.I couldn't answer right away. The article laid out, in careful, poisonous detail, an account of how Liam and I had begun our relationship while I was still married to Daniel, framed not as the complicated, painful thing it had actually been, but as something calculated. Deliberate. A pattern, the article suggested, of a woman who knew exactly how to make herself indispensable to powerful men, complete with a photo of me from some old company function I barely remembe

Chapter 217

Grant came by the office two days after the story broke, his expression grim before he even sat down across from Liam's temporary desk in the small conference room they'd been using since the suspension began."The delay request is gaining ground," he said, dropping into the chair without preamble, his tie slightly loosened like he'd been pulling at it all morning. "Sarah still seems solid, but the two who asked for time are using the Drew story as cover for something else entirely.""What do you mean, cover?""I mean Marcus found his opening again, faster than any of us expected. He's not defending the original vote anymore, not directly. He's reframing the whole conversation around judgment. Yours, specifically, for continuing a relationship that's now generating exactly the kind of press this board was worried about from the start."Liam's jaw tightened, a muscle jumping along his cheek. "The story is a lie, Grant. A distortion built by the same man we already proved orchestrated t

Chapter 218

Liam didn't answer my question right away, and the silence stretched long enough that I felt something inside me start to crack open, old and familiar, a feeling I thought I had already worked through months ago, back when we first built the promise this moment was now breaking."I didn't hide anything," he finally said, his voice careful, testing the words before committing to them fully."That's not the same as telling me, Liam. You know that's not the same thing at all.""I was going to tell you tonight, after I'd actually thought it through myself, once I had something clearer to bring you.""After you'd thought it through." I laughed, though nothing about it felt like laughter, more like something breaking loose from somewhere deep in my chest. "So the plan was to decide first and inform me second. That's exactly what you did with Kevin. You sent someone after him and didn't tell me until Ralph slipped and mentioned it by accident, months later, over dinner, like it was nothing."

Chapter 219

Amanda didn't ask many questions when I showed up at her door that night with a single overnight bag and eyes swollen from crying the entire drive over, my hands still shaking slightly on the wheel the whole way."Zoe's asleep," she said quietly, pulling me inside without waiting for an explanation, taking the bag from my shoulder like she'd known I was coming before I did. "Come on. I'll make tea."I stayed on her couch that first night, staring at the ceiling long after she'd gone to bed, replaying the fight over and over until the words lost their shape and became just sound, just noise, just the memory of my own voice cracking apart in my kitchen while Liam stood there searching for something to say that never came.Liam called the next morning. I watched his name flash on the screen and let it go to voicemail, my thumb hovering over the button without pressing it. He called again that afternoon, and again that evening, and by the third day the calls had slowed to one or two, repl

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