All Chapters of HATE ME, HUSBAND: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Layla’s POV“Ian, we need to talk.”He had barely made it through the living room door when I said it. He stopped and looked at me — and I could see immediately that he was already in a mood. Something about the set of his jaw, the tension around his eyes.“Oh.” A short sound. Almost amused. “The silent treatment is over.”“Ian Lawson.” I kept my voice level. “I need to talk to you like two adults.”He looked at me for a moment, then crossed to the sofa and dropped onto it with the particular heaviness of someone who had not slept properly. I sat down on the sofa opposite him.“What do you want to talk about?” he said, closing his eyes.He looked exhausted. Sleep deprived in a way that was visible even from where I was sitting.I pushed that observation aside.“The Scott deal,” I said. “What do you have to say about that?”What came next I did not expect.He smiled.Slow, deliberate, settling back into the sofa with the ease of someone who had been waiting for this conversation and fou

Ian’s POVTwo months laterLayla Thompson — now Layla Lawson on paper — was one of the most completely unhinged women I had ever encountered in my life.I meant that as close to a compliment as I was currently capable of giving her.Two months. Two months of sharing a house, a bed separated by a pillow barricade, a kitchen, a dining table, a driveway. Two months of the particular experiment of existing in close proximity to someone you had decided you could not stand and discovering, gradually and against your will, that the situation was more complicated than that initial decision had accounted for.Layla was stubborn in a way that I had no framework for. I had grown up around strong personalities — my grandfather, my father, Gabriel, people who pushed back and held their ground. But Layla was something different. She did not push back the way people pushed back with me. She simply refused to be moved, and then she said something that landed somewhere specific, and then she walked awa

Layla’s POVThe pain arrived before I was fully awake.Sharp, specific, settling behind my eyes and at the base of my skull with the particular cruelty of something that had been building while I slept and had decided now was the time to make itself known. I threw my head back against the pillow and pressed my eyes shut.Not again.My migraines had always been this way — not gradual warnings but sudden arrivals, going from manageable to completely debilitating in the space of minutes. They had started after my parents died. I was sixteen and the grief had done something to my body that no doctor had ever been able to fully explain — as though losing them had left a fault line somewhere inside me that occasionally cracked open without warning.Six months since the last one. I had thought maybe this time the gap would hold longer.The new collection. The distribution launch. The weeks of late nights and early mornings and skipped meals that I had told myself were necessary and temporary

Ian’s POVI had a problem.Not a business problem — those I could handle. Numbers, negotiations, difficult people across conference tables, markets that moved unpredictably, partners who needed managing — all of it fell within a category of challenge that I had been trained for and had spent years getting very good at.This was a different kind of problem.I was sitting at my desk on the forty-second floor of Lawson Group’s New York headquarters, in front of a spreadsheet that required my attention, and I was not looking at the spreadsheet.I was thinking about a red dress.More specifically I was thinking about the moment Layla had walked into the restaurant last night — the way the room had shifted slightly, the way my eyes had found her before I had consciously decided to look up, the way something had moved through my chest in the second before I got control of my expression.I pressed two fingers against my temple and looked back at the spreadsheet.The numbers made sense. I was n

Layla’s POVThe doorbell rang at seven.I was not expecting anyone. Hailey had called earlier to say she had a date dinner she could not get out of. Martha and Alexia had already retired for the evening. I had settled into the quiet of the house with a book and the particular peace of someone who had accepted that tonight was going to be a solo evening.I opened the door.Audrey stood on the step — neat, warm-faced, a bag over one shoulder and a carrier with what smelled like takeout in her other hand. She smiled when she saw my expression.“You look surprised,” she said.“I am surprised,” I said smiling. “What are you doing here?”“Ian called me this morning.” She tilted her head slightly. “To keep you company.” She held up the carrier. “I brought food. Thai. Ian said you like Thai.”I stared at her.“Ian asked someone to come and keep me company,” I said slowly.“He also asked me to check that you were okay,” she said. “I decided a movie date was better.” She paused. “Are you going t