All Chapters of Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret : Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

125 Chapters

Chapter 91: Sofia's Observation

She looked at me across a bottle of wine and said: you're still in love with him. I said: I didn't say that. She said: exactly.This happened on a Thursday evening six weeks after the press conference, in my apartment, which was where Sofia came when she had decided a conversation was happening and had determined that her office or a restaurant were the wrong venues for it. She brought the wine herself. She brought it without asking whether I wanted wine, because in fifteen years of friendship she had developed reliable intelligence about when wine was the correct environmental variable and when it was not, and this was a when it was.Leo was at a sleepover at his preschool friend's apartment, which he attended once a month with the focused efficiency of someone who understood that social obligations required periodic fulfillment and who intended to fulfill them completely and then return to his preferred schedule. He had packed Gerald, who attended sleepovers on the grounds that Gera

Chapter 92: Charlie Earns Something Small

He remembered. A stupid, small thing. And it mattered more than any boardroom victory.Seven weeks after the press conference. A joint business event, the kind that the merger had been generating with increasing frequency as the reopening came closer and the market watched to see what the partnership between Carter and Reeves and Kingsley Corp would produce in its normal operating register rather than in the extraordinary circumstances of a reckoning. A cocktail reception for industry figures and institutional investors, the specific, professional social occasion that existed at the intersection of networking and performing confidence in a project.I had attended in the red dress, which was a choice I had made without analyzing it too deeply. The red dress had become, since the press conference, the dress I wore when I intended to be fully present and fully visible, and a joint industry event with the merger partners was an occasion for both.Charlie was there, which was expected. He

Chapter 93: The Almost

We were alone in an elevator. For forty-five floors. I have never been more aware of the distance between two people.It was a Tuesday morning, eight weeks after the press conference, the Kingsley Corp building for a due diligence session on the merger reopening timeline. I had been in the building twice before since the press conference, once for an initial meeting that had been entirely professional and populated by both our teams, once for a shorter session where the attendee list had been smaller but still included Daniel and two of Charlie's analysts.This Tuesday there was a scheduling collision that had reduced the attendee list to two, the collision being genuine rather than engineered, I had checked, because I was still the person I was and I checked things, and the two being Charlie and me.The building's elevator was private to the executive floors. The ride to thirty-eight took forty-five seconds.We got in at the lobby level. The doors closed. The elevator began to rise.

Chapter 94: She Calls Adrian

He picked up on the first ring. He always did.This was different from what I had told you in Chapter 93, where I said I called Sofia and she answered. Both of those things are true and they are not contradictory. I called Sofia first, which was the right call to make in the immediate aftermath of the conference room, the call that needed to happen before anything else because Sofia was the one who could hold the full weight of the thing and help me understand what I had received and what I had said and what the saying of it meant. We talked for twenty-seven minutes on the drive back. She asked good questions. I gave honest answers. By the end of the call I understood several things more clearly than I had understood them in the conference room.Then, after I had been home for an hour and Leo had been picked up from school and was doing his after-school investigation of the week, which this week involved the aerodynamic properties of paper and had produced seventeen paper airplanes of

Chapter 95: What Leo Decides

He came home from his Saturday with Charlie and said: I think he's my dad for real now. Like it was that simple.In many ways, I thought afterward, it was.Not simple in the sense of uncomplicated. The situation between Charlie and me remained what it had been since the parking garage and the wine with Sofia and the conference room and the thing I had said out loud to Adrian on a Tuesday evening with seventeen paper airplanes distributed across the floor. Complicated and evidence-based and still assembling itself and not yet ready to be named in the direction it would need to be named. That was not simple.But Leo's decision was simple, in the specific, clarifying way that five-year-old decisions are simple, which was that they were reached through observation and evidence and the patient accumulation of data points and were then stated as conclusions without the architecture of hedge and qualification that adults build around the things they have concluded because adults understand t

Chapter 96: Charlie Finds Out What Leo Said

He called me. He could barely speak. That was the most human I had ever seen him.The call came not when I had told him it would happen, not on the Saturday I had warned him to be ready for, but on the Thursday before, at six forty-one in the evening, which was seventeen minutes after Leo had called Charlie for their regular Wednesday call, two days late because Leo had been occupied on Wednesday with a weather observation project that had required his full attention.I found out about the call because Leo came to find me in the kitchen at six forty-three, two minutes after it had ended, with the specific expression of someone who has done something significant and is reporting it."I called Dad," he said.The word landed in the kitchen the way significant words land, occupying more space than its syllables suggested.I set down the spatula I was holding. "How did that go?" I said."Good," Leo said. "He was quiet for a while after I said it. Then he said okay." Leo paused. "He sounded

Chapter 97: The Merger Closes

We signed the papers. It was everything I had wanted professionally. And none of it was the most important thing.The merger closing happened on a Wednesday morning in December, ten weeks after the press conference, in a conference room that was not the neutral-ground room of the original merger meeting but the Carter and Reeves conference room on the thirty-second floor, which was a choice I had made and which Charlie had agreed to without making it a negotiation, because the closing happening in my building communicated something about the nature of the partnership that the documents themselves could only partially express.The room was full for the signing. Both leadership teams, the legal representatives, Daniel and Sofia at the Carter and Reeves table, Marcus and Charlie's CFO at the Kingsley Corp table. The institutional investors had sent representatives. The communications teams were positioned for the photographs that would circulate to the financial press by afternoon.Sofia

Chapter 98: Victor Kane's Parting Shot

Even from a holding cell, he found a way to cause damage. He was nothing if not committed.The jailhouse interview appeared on a Thursday morning, the morning after the merger closing photographs had circulated in the financial press, which was not an accident. Victor Kane had spent ten weeks in pretrial detention with access to his legal team and a phone and the specific, calculating patience of a man who understood that his window for public influence was narrowing with each passing week of proceedings and who had been waiting for the correct moment to deploy what remained of his capacity to create noise.The merger closing photographs were the correct moment.He gave the interview to a journalist whose outlet was smaller than the ones that had covered the press conference but whose willingness to publish a jailhouse interview from a man facing federal financial crimes charges was itself an indicator of the outlet's relationship to journalistic standards. The interview covered sever

Chapter 99: Evelyn Reads the Statement

I read it three times. And then I called him.I have already told you this. Chapter 98 told you this, the call and the conversation and the soon and the okay that accepted the timeline. But I am writing Chapter 99 because something happened in the gap between reading the statement the third time and making the call, something that was private and significant and that happened in my office on a December afternoon with Sofia's wall visible through the open door and the city outside the window and the statement still on my screen.I sat with it.Not the statement itself, though the statement was still there. I sat with the specific, clarifying weight of what had been done in the hours since the jailhouse interview had been published. Not the defamation response, which Sofia had drafted and my legal team had filed and which would have consequences for Victor Kane's legal position that his legal team would understand before end of business. Not the suppression, which was underway and which

Chapter 100: The First Real Dinner

We sat across from each other in a restaurant without an agenda. It was the most terrifying meal of my life.Not in the way of things that are terrifying because they contain danger. In the way of things that are terrifying because they matter and mattering is its own form of exposure and exposure, even after everything I had built and done and survived, was still the thing that required the most from me.He had asked. Not through a meeting request or a calendar invitation or any of the professional apparatus that had governed our contact for eleven weeks. He had texted, simply, on a Wednesday evening twelve weeks after the press conference: Would you have dinner with me? Not a business dinner. Just dinner.I had looked at the text for a long time.I had typed back: Saturday. Seven.He had sent back: Yes.He chose the restaurant. I had told him to choose it and he had, and the choice said things about who he was in a way that a choice I had made myself would not have. He had not chose

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