All Chapters of My Ex Husband Chose My Sister: Now he wants me back Too Late: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

ISAACI called Milly three times before she finally picked up, and I understood why. I hadn’t earned her answering the first time, or the second, or probably the third either.“What do you want, Isaac.”“Fifteen minutes.” My voice came out rougher than I meant it to. “That’s all I’m asking. There’s a café near your old apartment on Ninth. Public. Quiet. I need to tell you something.”Silence stretched long enough that I thought she’d hung up.“Fifteen minutes,” she said finally. “That’s it.”She looked different when she walked in. Not the woman I’d married, not even the woman I’d humiliated at that gala all those months ago. Something steadier now, sharper, and it made me feel every year of what I’d done to her all at once.“You look tired,” she said, sitting across from me.“I haven’t slept properly in weeks.”“Neither have I.” She didn’t offer sympathy with it. Just fact, laid flat on the table between us. “You said you needed to tell me something.”I turned my coffee cup slowly, w

MILLYWe stayed like that for a long time, his arms around me, the study quiet except for the sound of both of us breathing slower now, calmer than we’d been ten minutes earlier.“I need you to hear something,” I said eventually, pulling back just enough to look at him. “Isaac doesn’t have power over me anymore. Not emotionally. Not the way he used to.”“You don’t have to convince me of that.”“I think I do, a little.” I searched his face. “Because I watched you react to those photos like some part of you believed I might actually go back to him, and I need you to understand that isn’t possible. Not because of you. Because of what I learned about myself these past few months.” I took his hand. “I don’t need him anymore, Declan. I don’t need his approval, his attention, his guilt. I need answers about my own life, and if he happens to have some of them, that doesn’t mean I want anything else from him.”Something in Declan’s shoulders eased slightly.“I know that. Logically.” He exhaled

MILLYThe key opened a storage unit on the far edge of the city, one of those anonymous facilities with rows of identical metal doors, the kind of place nobody would think to look unless they already knew exactly what they were searching for.“You don’t have to do this tonight,” Declan said, standing beside me in front of unit 214, the key steady in my hand despite how badly my pulse was racing. “We can wait until morning.”“I need to know now.” My fingers tightened around the key. “I’ve waited twenty-five years without even knowing there was something to wait for. I’m not waiting one more night.”He didn’t argue. He just reached over and pulled the door up with me, the metal groaning as it lifted, revealing a space smaller than I expected, packed floor to ceiling with boxes.“Clara kept all of this,” I whispered. “This whole time.”“She was protecting it,” Declan said quietly. “Waiting for the right moment to hand it to someone she trusted.”We started with the boxes nearest the door

DECLANRichard Laurent is not the real enemy.I hadn’t stopped hearing that sentence since we left the storage unit, playing on repeat in my head while Adrian spread Evelyn’s files across my office desk, both of us working through the night trying to find whatever she’d run out of time to say.“There’s a pattern here,” Adrian said, holding up a page covered in initials and numbers instead of names. “She never used full names in her later notes. Too dangerous, probably, in case anyone got their hands on the files early. But look at this.”He laid three documents side by side.“These initials repeat across multiple entries. R.L., obviously your grandfather. But also H.C. and V.M., referenced consistently alongside the financial transfers.” He tapped the page. “Whoever these two are, they’re connected just as deeply as Richard is. Maybe more.”“Any idea who?”“Not yet. But the pattern of the transfers suggests a consortium. Multiple families, not just one, coordinating together over deca

MILLYWashington had officially lost its mind by the time I woke that morning.Every channel carried some version of the same story, fragments of Evelyn Ward’s files that hadn’t been destroyed in the cyberattack apparently leaking out through channels nobody could trace, enough of it circulating now that reporters had started connecting names out loud that used to only get whispered behind closed doors.CORRUPTION SCANDAL ROCKS WASHINGTON ELITE.POLITICAL CONSORTIUM ALLEGEDLY LINKED TO LAURENT AND BROOKE FAMILIES.I sat at the kitchen island scrolling through headline after headline, my coffee going cold beside me, while Declan paced the length of the room on the phone with Adrian, his voice sharp and clipped in a way that told me the situation was worse than either of them had expected.“Isaac’s in the hospital,” he said, hanging up finally, his face grim.I set my cup down hard enough that coffee sloshed over the side.“What happened?”“Car accident. Last night, coming from somewher