All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Regret Clause;One Year Together. One Love : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Celestine Brandt arrived at David Okafor's offices on a Thursday morning in the first week of December looking like a woman who had been waiting a long time to say something and had spent that time deciding exactly how she would say it.She was composed in the way of someone who had done their own preparation — had anticipated the room, the legal teams, the presence of the two men whose lives had been the subject of the operation she had participated in. She wore dark clothes and carried a briefcase and sat across the conference table from Ernest and Don and the assembled legal teams with a quality that was neither apologetic nor aggressive. She was there to tell the truth. She had arranged herself for that purpose.David made the formal introductions. The ground rules were established — the meeting was on record, both legal teams had agreed on the scope, and Celestine's own solicitor was present. The NDA had been confirmed unenforceable in the relevant territory. She was free to spea

The Christmas of the second year was different from the first.The first Christmas had been the estate's corporate event — fifty guests, black-tie dinner, the professional performance of two men who had been in the same house for six weeks and were still navigating the managed distance of the early months. Ernest remembered it with the clarity that significant things had: the candlelight and the careful choreography and the look across the dinner table that had lasted four seconds and that he had carried to bed and laid in the dark.This Christmas was quieter. The estate's corporate programme had concluded for the year. The staff had their own arrangements. Helen Marsh would be with her family in Bristol. Thomas had a daughter in Edinburgh. Felicity was in London. Andrew Sutton had his family in the village.The house was theirs.This was new — not the having of the house, which they had had every evening and every weekend for more than a year. But having it for an extended period wit

January of the third year arrived with the specific quality of a new year that was not asking anything of them.Ernest had always found January demanding — the particular pressure of beginnings, of the cultural expectation that the turning of a calendar page constituted an opportunity for reinvention, for the setting of intentions, for the reckoning with what had not been accomplished in the preceding twelve months. He had always met January with a list. A structured set of professional objectives, a recalibration of the West Capital strategy, the performance reviews, the forward planning. January was architecture. January was the laying of foundations.This January he woke on the second — the first had been spent in the sitting room with Don and a bottle of wine and no particular agenda, which had been its own form of revolutionary act for a man who had once spent every New Year's Eve at an industry dinner being strategically visible — and felt no particular urgency about the archite

Don's mother came in March.Her name was Grace James and she was sixty-eight years old and she drove herself from her home in Shropshire in a car that was ten years old and entirely reliable, arriving at the Hollowell Estate on a Friday afternoon with a bag of things she had brought for the house — a jar of the marmalade she made every January, a book she had finished and thought Don would like, and a plant in a terracotta pot that she described as easy to manage, which Ernest correctly understood as evidence that she had thought about the house and what it needed.Ernest had met Grace twice before. Once at a gallery opening in Birmingham that Don had taken him to in the first year of their relationship, and once at a Christmas dinner in the second year of the marriage, at which Ernest had been — he understood now, in retrospect — significantly less present than the occasion required. He had been polite. He had been socially functional. He had not been the person Grace deserved from t

The West Capital board call took place on a Tuesday morning in the third week of April.There were seven board members. Ernest chaired. Marcus Holt sat in as company secretary. The call was scheduled for sixty minutes and ran for eighty-five, which Ernest noted as evidence that the board had more anxiety than Marcus's careful framing had suggested, and that the anxiety required more thorough addressing than a sixty-minute call could accommodate.He had prepared for ninety.He opened with the factual position: Ernest West was the complainant in a regulatory investigation. Not the subject. Not under investigation. The complainant — the party whose interests had been harmed and who had brought the evidence of that harm to the appropriate bodies. He made this distinction clearly and without impatience, because Marcus had been right that the board had not been operating with sufficient clarity about what complainant meant in this context, and insufficient clarity was the source of the anxi