Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 51 - Chapitre 60

Sophie’s POVI set the water glass down carefully."Ares—""I'm not finished," he said. Not unkindly. Just — not finished. "I want you working closely with me. Not as a favor. Not as something I'm offering out of obligation or because of the house or Derek or any of that." His eyes held mine and they were very direct and very certain. "I want you there because I think you're capable and because I trust you, and those two things together are rarer than you would imagine."The candle flickered between us.I looked at it for a moment. Then I looked back at him."I don't think I'm the right person," I said quietly.He said nothing. He waited."I haven't worked in — in anything, really, since before the marriage. I don't have experience in a company like Callahan Industries. I don't know the people or the systems or—""Sophie.""I'm serious, I don't want to let you down when you've already—""Sophie." His voice was the same quiet firmness it always was when he wanted me to stop moving and

Sophie’s POVEach word placed deliberately. Quietly. With the particular weight of someone who had chosen them carefully and meant every single one of them exactly as stated."Ares—""I'm not finished." He said it gently, but it stopped me completely. "You are not a contract. You are not an obligation or a consequence or a situation to be managed." He looked at me for a long, unblinking moment. "You are not nobody to me. You have never been nobody to me."I stared at him."From the moment I saw you on that pavement in the rain," he said, his voice dropping lower, "with your legs giving out and your face—" He stopped briefly. His jaw moved. "I saw you, Sophie. Not the wife. Not the name. You. And everything I have seen since then has only—" He paused, like a man choosing the right word with great care. "Confirmed it."The restaurant went on around us. Quietly. Entirely unbothered. A couple at the next table laughed at something. A waiter moved past with a tray. The candle between us b

Derek's POVI was sitting at my desk staring at my phone and trying to talk myself out of something stupid.The idea had been sitting in my head since morning. Simple enough on the surface — call Sophie, ask her if she wanted lunch. Nothing complicated about it. People asked people to lunch every day without it meaning anything.Except that I was her husband and I had never once in two years of marriage thought to ask her to lunch, and the fact that I was thinking about it now meant something that I was not ready to look at directly.I put the phone face down on the desk.Then I picked it up again.The truth — the honest, uncomfortable truth that I had been avoiding with increasing effort over the past week — was that I didn't know what was happening to me. Something had shifted and I couldn't point to the exact moment it started or explain what had caused it, and both of those things bothered me considerably because I was a man who liked to understand the mechanics of things.I kept

Sophie's POVMy phone rang the moment Ares turned the car onto the main road leading back to the estate.I looked at the screen.Derek.I had been expecting it. The moment I saw Lana's face outside that restaurant — the slow curl of that smile, the way her eyes moved between me and the car — I had known the call was coming. I had just hoped it would wait until I was home and on solid ground and not sitting in Ares's car with the warmth of lunch still sitting in my chest.It hadn't waited.I pressed answer and put the phone to my ear."Derek—""Where the fuck are you?"He didn't say hello. He didn't say my name. Just that. Short and cold and clipped, the voice of a man who was angry and not bothering to dress it up.I opened my mouth to answer but he didn't give me the space."You're with him, aren't you." Not a question. The flat, hard statement of someone who already knew the answer and was saying it out loud to hear how it felt. "You're with Ares.""Derek, it was just lunch—""I don

Sophie's POVFive words.Said plainly. Dropped on the table like the bill at the end of a meal. Simple and final and completely, carelessly cruel in the way that only truly thoughtless things could be, because he hadn't planned it — I could see that on his face even as he said it, the slight widening of his own eyes that told me the words had come out more completely than even he had intended — but they had come out. They were out now. In the air. In the room. In the ears of every person sitting at this table.You're not smart enough.The words hit me somewhere deep and quiet and old. The same place Shirley's words always found. The same soft spot that two years in this house had mapped and targeted. I felt them sink in the way things sank that were going to stay for a while.SLAM.The sound was enormous in the quiet dining room.Ares's palm hit the table so hard that the plates jumped and the glasses shivered and the water in the jug rippled outward from the impact. Every person at t