All Chapters of Three-Years Contract Marriage with the Billionaire : Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

don't know when we had drifted.This is the specific and honest accounting of it, I do not know at what point in the evening the distance between my end of the table and his end of the table had become the distance that currently existed between us, which was not the distance of two people at opposite ends of a table but the distance of two people who were much closer than opposite ends, who were, in the specific and present fact of the moment I was now in, near.Near in the way that had a specific and physical quality.Near enough that the lamp was equally between us, near enough that his contract and my letters occupied the same general territory of the table rather than the separate and distinct territories of a table with a significant distance down its middle, near enough that when I had looked up at the sound of his voice I had found his face at a proximity that was different from the proximit I had been maintaining in my peripheral awareness.I had been maintaining the far end

JULIANI did not notice the handwriting until the fourth letter.I was reading the contract. I want to be precise about this because the precision matters, because I had been reading the contract with the specific and practiced attention I brought to contracts, which was not approximate attention but the full and particular engagement of a man who had learned that the thing in a contract you were going to need was usually in the part that did not appear to be the relevant part, who read thoroughly as a matter of specific and professional habit.I had been reading the contract.I was aware of her at the other end of the table in the way I was always aware of Lena Carter when we were in a shared space, which was the specific and constant awareness of a man who had stopped being able to not be aware of her sometime in September and had not, since September, found a way to reverse the condition.I was aware of her.I was reading the contract.And then something in the peripheral vision ca

LENAThe roses required attention.I want to be precise about this because there is a version of the evening that positions me on the terrace as a woman who had arranged herself in proximity to a thing she knew Julian Voss would eventually come home to, and that version is not accurate, is not the specific and honest accounting of a woman who had finished the afternoon's foundation work at four-thirty and had come to the terrace at four forty-five because the roses required attention and she had the time.They required attention.The second cutting on the left side of the trellis had been pulling away from the support for three days. I had noticed it on Tuesday morning during the specific and early part of the morning when I came to the terrace before I was a person yet, before the day had made its particular and full demands of me, the quiet and reliable time I had found in the weeks since the transplanting to simply be near them — near the specific and irreducible fact of them, the

JULIANI came home because of the quarterly review.I want to be precise about this because the precision matters for the specific and honest accounting of the evening, because there is a version of coming home early on a Thursday that has the particular and motivated quality of a man who had been watching the terrace schedule with the specific and unofficial awareness of a man who knew that she went to the terrace on Thursdays in the afternoon, and that version is not inaccurate, and I am going to be honest about that, and I am also going to say that the quarterly review was genuinely the reason I had been in the car at four-fifteen, that the meeting had ended early in the specific and practical way that meetings ended early when the primary objections had been resolved in the first hour and there was nothing to stay for, and that I had come home because the penthouse had the Whitley files I needed, which were not at the office, which were in the study on the third shelf.I had come

JULIANThe call was Thomas.Thomas needed nothing important.I want to be precise about this because the precision is the thing, the specific and particular quality of what Thomas needed, which was a confirmation of a meeting time that Nate could have confirmed, that his assistant could have confirmed, that did not require the specific and immediate answering of a phone on a terrace in November by a man who had been one centimeter from a woman's face with his hand on a ladder and her name still in the air.Thomas needed a meeting time.I confirmed the meeting time.I stood on the terrace for six more minutes after the call ended and I looked at the city and I looked at the roses and I went inside and went around through the kitchen and got the Whitley files from the third shelf and sat down at the desk in the study and looked at the files without opening them for a specific and particular amount of time that I am not going to quantify because the quantifying would require me to accoun