All Chapters of One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend: Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

I go back to Blackwood Holdings on a Monday morning six months after the shareholder meeting.Not in the same role I left. That is the first thing I establish, not with Lucian, not through a conversation at the kitchen island or a discussion in bed or any of the forums in which important things between us have been decided. I establish it alone, in the three weeks before I return, in a series of meetings with Marcus and the board and the two outside consultants I bring in specifically because they have no prior relationship with the company and therefore no prior relationship with me.I propose the ethics and transparency division myself.Not as a response to Gabriel Kane or Victor's misconduct or the year that just passed. As a permanent structural addition to the company. A division whose function is to ensure that the mechanisms Gabriel exploited, the dormant accounts, the audit vulnerabilities, the compartmentalized assets, cannot be exploited again. Not because Blackwood Holdings

Isabella sends the text on a Wednesday evening in December.Not a long text. Not a message that requires explanation or context or the careful framing of something complicated. Just two sentences, sent from the number I have had in my phone since the coffee shop in the West Village, since the morning I sat across from her and asked about Gabriel Kane directly and watched her become, fractionally and then completely, someone I understood.Thank you for believing I wasn't just a villain. I hope this counts for something.I read it twice.Then I call Sophia.Not because I need advice. Because Sophia is the person I tell things to when they are too significant to sit with alone, and this is one of those things, the particular weight of a text from a woman who spent eighteen months inside a trap and came out the other side and is now, quietly and without announcement, rebuilding.Sophia answers on the second ring."Isabella sent me a text," I say."I know," Sophia says. "She sent me one to

Sophia tells me on a Saturday afternoon in February.Not at the penthouse. At the coffee shop in the West Village, which has become, over the months since the shareholder meeting and the hospital and the particular settling of things that follows a significant period, a place we go when we have something to say that requires neutral ground and good coffee and the specific quality of a room that does not belong to either of our lives in particular.She is already there when I arrive. She has two coffees and the expression that I have learned to read across fifteen years of friendship, the one that contains something significant and is managing the containing with more effort than usual.I sit down.I look at her.She picks up her coffee."I need to tell you something," she says."I know," I say. "You have been about to tell me for two weeks."She looks at me. "How do you know.""You called me three times this week at hours when you do not usually call," I say. "And then hung up before

He remembers at ten past ten on a Tuesday evening in April.I know this because I am in the kitchen when it happens. I can hear him in the study, the particular rhythm of a man reviewing budget documents at the end of a long day, the slight sound of pages turning and the occasional low conversation with himself that he does not know he does and that I have never told him about because it is one of the things I have been collecting for two years and intend to keep.And then the pages stop.A pause.Then the sound of him standing.Then the study door.He comes into the kitchen with his jacket still on and his phone in his hand and the expression of a man who has just understood something and is determining what to do about it in real time.He looks at me."What day is it," he says."Tuesday," I say."The date," he says.I look at him."April fourteenth," I say.He looks at the ceiling for a moment. Then back at me.I wait."I almost forgot," he says."I know," I say."Did you remember,"

He writes it on a Tuesday evening in November.One year after the shareholder meeting. One year after the hospital. One year after Gabriel Kane walked out of a room alone and Patricia Hale was escorted through a door and the company that someone spent twelve years trying to dismantle was still standing.I know he is writing it because he is in the study with the door closed, which he does when he needs the room to himself in a way that does not require explanation, and I am in the bedroom with Patricia, who is eleven months old and has developed the ability to pull herself upright against furniture and does so at every available opportunity and then looks at whoever is nearby with the expression of someone who has accomplished something significant and expects it to be acknowledged.I acknowledge it.She pulls herself upright again.I acknowledge it again.We are doing this when I hear him stand from his desk. Then the sound of the fireplace, which we use on November evenings when the