جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 60

RICHARDThe story broke two days after Karen filed, and I read it alone in my office at eight in the morning with my cup of coffee sitting untouched beside me, slowly going cold while the city outside my windows carried on like nothing monumental had just happened.At first, I thought it was the article Lena had warned me about. But this was not that story. This was something else entirely. This was clean, precise and merciless.I sat back in my chair and read every single line carefully while the silence in my office seemed to grow heavier around me. The journalist had clearly been handed specific details in advance because the article moved with the confidence of someone who knew exactly where every body had been buried. Every claim was backed with emails, dates, financial trails, internal communications, and documented timelines that painted the sabotage campaign against A.A. Biotech with terrifying clarity.And right in the middle of it all was Lena Hartwell, not vaguely mentioned

LENA.My lawyer called me at exactly eleven in the morning.I stared at my phone for almost three rings before answering because I already knew the kind of conversation it was going to be. Nobody called that early with good news anymore, not in my life at least. By the time I finally pressed the phone to my ear, I was already sitting upright on the couch with my coffee growing cold beside me.“Good morning, Ms. Hartwell,” he said carefully, almost cautiously.I didn’t bother with small talk. “Talk to me.”There was a brief pause before papers shuffled softly on his end.He started from the beginning, laying everything out piece by piece in that calm professional tone lawyers mastered after years of dealing with disasters for wealthy people. Normally I interrupted him constantly. I questioned details, challenged assumptions, pushed back against anything I didn’t like hearing. He was used to that from me. Everyone was.But this time I said nothing.I simply listened.The silence stretch

RICHARDThe memory of today's date hit me instantly as I woke up that morning, and with it came a heaviness I found very difficult to take off my chest. Sophie was two years old today. Two years old somewhere in Boston while I sat in Seattle pretending I had learned how to live a normal life.The apartment was still unfamiliar in ways I had not expected. It had been nearly a month since I moved in after stepping down from Palmer Group, yet there were still moments when I walked into the kitchen and paused because the silence surprised me. No assistants calling. No schedule waiting on the counter. No meetings stacked on top of meetings. Just a refrigerator humming softly and the smell of coffee I had made myself because there was nobody else to do it anymore.The kitchen counter was small enough that I could reach almost everything without moving my feet. That fact still felt ridiculous to me sometimes.I stood there in sweatpants and a grey shirt that needed ironing, staring at the w

RICHARD.Two hours had gone by in a way that almost felt unreal to me because I could still remember arriving at Karen’s house feeling tense and out of place, yet somehow the afternoon had slowly softened around me until I found myself sitting quietly in the middle of something warm enough to hurt.Karen’s garden looked beautiful in the late afternoon light. The flowers along the fence had caught the sun in a way that made the entire place glow softly, and colorful balloons floated lazily above the tables while music drifted through the air at a volume low enough for conversations to overlap comfortably. The gathering itself was small, carefully chosen, and intimate. Karen had invited just a few friends—probably the only people she genuinely trusted around Sophie—and somehow that realization settled heavily in my chest because I understood what that meant.Trust mattered to her. Trust had probably become expensive.I sat slightly apart from everyone else in a chair near the edge of t

RICHARD.It had been three weeks since I had gone to Boston for Sophie’s birthday, and somehow those three weeks had only made things worse instead of better. I had honestly believed that once I returned home and settled back into work, the memories would slowly fade into the background like everything else usually did. I thought time and distance would help me regain control of myself, but it hadn’t.That Saturday morning, I woke up with Sophie already in my mind.I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling while memories of her replayed over and over again like scenes from a movie I could not pause. Her laughter echoed in my head so clearly that I could almost hear it in the room with me. I kept seeing those dark curls bouncing as she ran around during the party, and the way she had carried herself with that strange little confidence children sometimes had without even trying.She was small, vibrant, observant, and somehow she had completely unsettled me.Every attempt I made to push her