THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 61 - 챕터 70

JADEN’S POVThe detail Olivia gave me opened something.Not immediately. It took Ethan forty minutes of pulling threads from the regulatory database before the shape of it became clear. I watched him work from across the desk with the particular focus of someone who understood that what he was looking for existed and the only question was how well it had been hidden.The answer was well.But not well detailed enough.The Cross family had been careful. Fifteen years of carefulness. The kind of care that came from doing something repeatedly and refining the method each time until it looked less like concealment and more like standard procedure.But standard procedure had patterns.And patterns left traces.Ethan found the first one at eleven thirty.He looked up from his screen with an expression he rarely wore. Not excitement. Something quieter than that. The specific look of a man who has been searching for something for a long time and has just seen the edge of it beneath the surface

OLIVIA’S POVIt happened on a Wednesday afternoon.I was in my room folding laundry.It was one of the ordinary things I still insisted on doing myself. The staff offered every time with polite persistence and every time I thanked them and said I was fine, and I could handle folding my laundry. There was something grounding about it. Something that connected me to a version of myself that existed outside of galas and contracts and the particular complicated world I had moved into.I was halfway through a stack of clothes.Folding methodically. A blouse. A cardigan. The grey dress I had worn to the second event. Setting each one down and reaching for the next.I picked up a shirt.Started folding it.And the thought arrived before I could do anything about it.Dinner is in two hours.Not as information.As something I was looking forward to.I stopped moving.Stood there with the half folded shirt in my hands and looked at the wall in front of me.I was not looking forward to the food

JADEN’S POVThe next day, I had gotten a notification of a board meeting, and this meeting could not be handled if I was at home, neither could it be handled through a zoom meeting call. So I had my breakfast and left for work immediately. When I got to the office the board meeting started at nine.I had prepared for it the way I prepared for everything. Thoroughly. The numbers were in my head before I sat down. The questions I anticipated. The objections most likely to surface and the responses I had already constructed for each of them.But I was ready.And then somewhere around the forty minute mark I lost the thread. I don’t know how it happened, or what could have triggered my mind off all I had prepared for Not dramatically. No one in the room would have noticed. I was still present in the functional sense. Still seated at the head of the table. Still maintaining the appropriate eye contact and posture of a man running a meeting he had called.But my mind had gone somewhere e

OLIVIA’S POVI picked up the cup and drank the rest of the tea. I slowly set it back on the saucer with the particular deliberateness of someone deciding what they were going to do next by doing the most ordinary thing available first.I did not cry, I don't think I should,I noticed that. Note it the way you noted things about yourself in difficult moments. The tears did not come. Not because I was not feeling anything. Because what I was feeling had no outlet in tears. It was too quiet for that. Too settled in its weight.I did not call Shay.I thought about it. The familiar pull of wanting to put this in her hands and hear her arrange it into something manageable. She would know what to say. She always knew what to say.But this felt like something I needed to hold alone for a while before I handed it to anyone else.I did not confront Jaden, about the message I got from his ex-girlfriend. Or should I say waiting girlfriend? He was not even home and I would not have known what to

OLIVIA’S POV The thought was there before I was fully awake.That was the thing about the kind of thinking that did not want to stop. It did not wait for you to be ready. It was simply present the moment consciousness arrived. Like it had been sitting in the dark beside your bed all night waiting for your eyes to open.I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling.The photograph. The date stamp. The words beneath it arranged with the precision of someone who knew exactly where to press.“He was with me before you. He will be with me after.” It’s already been three days now.It had been three days since the message arrived and I had set the phone face down and finished my tea and decided to carry it quietly until I knew what to do with it. Three days of carrying it through breakfast and dinner and the library and the evenings and the carefully managed face I had been wearing like a second skin since Monday.Three days and it had not gotten lighter.If anything it had gotten heavier in t