All Chapters of Rebirth; it’s too late, Dear ex: Chapter 11 - Chapter 18

“Tell me exactly what your mother told you,” I said. “Every detail. Leave nothing out.”Nina wrapped both hands around her coffee cup and looked at the table for a second, like she was deciding where to start. Then she looked up.“My mother worked for Ashford for nine years. She handled his personal accounts separately from the firm’s main books. He trusted her because she was quiet and she never asked questions.” Nina’s voice was steady but her knuckles were white around that cup. “Two years ago she started noticing transfers. Small amounts at first. Irregular intervals. The kind of thing you miss if you aren’t looking closely.”“But she was looking closely.”“She was good at her job.” Something flickered in Nina’s eyes. Pride and grief mixed together in a way that made my chest ache despite everything. “The transfers always came from the same source account. She traced it back three layers and it kept landing on the same name. Irish Devonte’s private holdings company.”I kept my fac

FIVE MINUTES“What exactly is she going to tell them?”I asked it quietly. No shake in my voice. No spike of fear that anyone in that room could see. Just the question, clean and direct, because the only way to measure a threat was to understand its actual shape.Jeremy looked at the phone in his hand like it had just become something heavier than it was. “She says she has medical documentation. Proof of the pregnancy. She will frame it as you trapping me. Trying to use a baby to stop the divorce.”“That’s her move,” I said. “A pregnant woman using her unborn child as leverage against a man trying to leave her.” I let the words sit in the air for a second. “That’s what she is selling to the press.”He didn’t deny it.I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Because somewhere behind his eyes I could see that he knew exactly how it sounded. He knew the shape of what his mother was willing to do and he had spent years choosing not to look at it directly and now it was sitting in the room wit

WHAT XAVIER KNOWS“Tell me,” I said.He didn’t reach for a soft way to say it. That was one thing about Xavier that I had always noticed without letting myself think about too much. He didn’t dress things up. He didn’t build you a comfortable chair before he handed you something painful. He just handed it to you and trusted you to hold it.“Irish Devonte knows about the pregnancy because she arranged for someone inside the hospital to pull your records the same day you were admitted.” He held my gaze. “She has known since yesterday morning. Before the dinner. Before she came to the house.”I sat with that.She had sat across from me at that dinner table last night with the full knowledge of my pregnancy already in her hands. She had held my hands when she left and looked me in the eyes and delivered her quiet warning and she had known the entire time.“What does Jeremy want to tell me?” I asked.“After you left Ashford’s office this morning, Irish called Jeremy again. She told him som

“Brittany is in New York,” I said.Xavier took the phone from my hand and looked at the photograph for three seconds. Then he handed it back and pulled into the next lane without a word, his jaw set in that particular way that meant he was thinking fast and didn’t want to say anything until he had finished.“She wasn’t supposed to be back yet,” I said. “The outline I had in my head put her return weeks from now. After the divorce. After the inheritance filing gained ground.”“Irish accelerated the timeline.” His voice was flat. “The press story this morning wasn’t just about discrediting you. It was about signaling Brittany to move.”I scrolled through the rest of what Marcus had sent. Three more photographs, different angles of the same hospital entrance, taken over a span of about twenty minutes. Brittany wasn’t going inside. She was standing outside. Looking. Mapping the layout, the entrance points, the foot traffic pattern.My stomach tightened.“She’s not there to visit anyone,”