THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 81 - 챕터 90

OLIVIA’S POVThe silence after my question was longer than any of the others.I sat with it without filling it. That was the thing about having loved someone for six years. You learned their silences. The way each kind sounded different. The silence of someone thinking. The silence of someone deciding. The silence of someone caught between what they had planned to say and what they were actually going to say.This was the third kind.“I need to know what Jaden is planning,” Adrian said finally.There it was.I looked at the library shelves in front of me. At the rows of books arranged with Jaden’s particular precision. At the room I had made my own over fourteen months without meaning to.“Specifically,” Adrian continued, his voice shifting slightly into something more practiced now that the pretense had dropped, “the regulatory response. He filed something counter to our complaint and I need to understand the scope of it. You have access to things I do not. Things you would know from

OLIVIA’S POVI could not sleep.It was one of those nights that arrived without warning. Not the anxious kind from the early months in this house. Not the grief kind from the hospital months. Just the wide awake kind. The kind where your body had decided it was finished with sleep for reasons it did not feel obligated to explain.I lay in the dark for an hour.Turned over.Turned back.Got up and went to the window and looked at the grounds and came back to bed.Picked up my phone at half past one because that was what you did at half past one when sleep had decided to go somewhere else.I opened the news app out of habit.Scrolled.And stopped.The headline was from a gossip outlet. The kind that operated in the specific territory between news and cruelty and had learned to dress the second thing as the first.I stared at the title.Then I opened the article.And read it.And read it again.It was detailed in the way that required access.Not the vague innuendo of someone working fro

OLIVIA’S POVHe was already there when I came downstairs.I had not expected that. I had spent the last hour in my room rehearsing the conversation. How I would tell him. The order of it. The way I would keep my voice even and my face managed and present it as information requiring a response rather than something that had kept me awake since half past one with shaking hands.I had a plan.The plan dissolved the moment I saw his face.He was sitting at the dining table with no phone in front of him and no file and no screen. Just him. Two coffee cups. The morning quiet of the house around him.He had already seen it.I understood that the moment I sat down across from him. The particular quality of his stillness. The way he looked at me without the assessing professional look. The other one. The one that asked questions the contract had not written in.“Are you alright?” he said.And it was the way he said it.Not the routine inquiry of one person checking in on another. Something und

OLIVIA’S POVThe sitting room had settled into the particular quiet of a morning that had already contained too much.We had been sitting in it together for almost an hour. Not talking. Not performing the comfortable silence we had developed over months. Something different from that. Something that had weight in it but was not heavy. The specific quality of two people who had just moved through something significant together and were still inside the aftermath of it.The article was being taken down.The retraction was being prepared.Camille had been warned in terms that Jaden had described as final and that I believed completely.I looked at the grounds outside the window. At the morning going about its ordinary business with complete indifference to the fact that I had spent my night with shaking hands reading comments from strangers and my morning being held steady by a man who had made three phone calls before nine o’clock on my behalf.I turned from the window.Looked at him.H

OLIVIA’S POVIt was one of those evenings that arrived gently.No event. No appointment. No appearance required of either of us. The day had finished quietly and the house had settled into its evening self and somewhere around seven Jaden had appeared at the door of the sitting room where I was reading and said simply:“Come outside.”Not a question.Not an instruction exactly.Just an invitation offered in the particular way of someone who had decided they wanted company and had chosen whose.I set my book down and followed him.The back terrace in the evening was one of the things I had come to love about this house without planning to.The way the city spread out beyond the grounds. The specific quality of the light as it dropped. The particular cooling of the air that happened in the hour between late afternoon and dark when the temperature shifted and everything became slightly more itself.We sat in the chairs we had developed a habit of occupying. He's on the left. Mine on the