All Chapters of Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

"She said: 'If he hurts you again, I will take him apart cell by cell.' I said that was fair."The champagne was Sofia's idea.Of course it was. The woman had a bottle of Veuve Clicquot already open before I had finished the sentence, already pouring before I had even said his name, like she had been rehearsing this moment in her head for weeks and had decided that whatever I was about to tell her required something cold and expensive and celebratory, even if she wasn't sure yet whether to celebrate or mourn.I sat across from her at her kitchen island, both hands wrapped around the glass she pressed into my fingers, and I watched her face do the thing it always did when she was trying to be neutral. Her jaw tightened. Her brow smoothed out too deliberately. She looked like a woman performing calm in a courtroom."So," she said. "Charlie."Not a question. Just his name. Dropped between us like a stone into still water."We've been talking," I said. "Really talking. Not business. Not a

"He took me to a rooftop restaurant I'd never been to. He'd asked Leo for recommendations. Leo had said pizza. He upgraded significantly."He texted me the address at six-fifteen and said, dress for a view.I stood in my closet for eleven minutes. Not because I didn't know what to wear. Because I was thirty-one years old and the CEO of a company that had reshaped two industries and I was standing in front of a rack of clothes with my heart doing something embarrassing and uncoordinated in my chest, and I needed a moment to find my footing before I walked out the door.I chose a navy dress. Simple. Mine.The car dropped me at an address in Midtown I didn't recognize, and when the elevator opened onto the rooftop, the city spread out below like something that had been arranged specifically for this evening. Warm lights, open sky, the kind of quiet that only exists forty floors up when the wind is just right and everything below feels very far away and very small.Charlie was already the

"He said it in a parking garage. Of all the places. I almost laughed. I didn't."It was not supposed to happen in a parking garage.I know that sounds like the beginning of a complaint. It isn't. It is simply the truth that nothing between Charlie Kingsley and me has ever happened the way it was supposed to, in the place it was supposed to, at the time that would have made the most narrative sense. We have always been slightly off-script. Collision and consequence rather than choreography.So. A parking garage. Level three. The kind with yellow painted lines and flickering overhead lights and the distant echo of a car alarm two levels down that nobody was doing anything about. We had just finished a late joint meeting with the Carter and Reeves legal team about the final merger documentation, the kind of meeting that runs ninety minutes past its scheduled end and leaves everyone slightly depleted and reaching for their phones before they are fully out of the building.I had my bag ove

"His grandmother arrived with presents and too much perfume and Leo immediately asked if she was a queen."Vanessa Kingsley called me on a Thursday morning to ask if she could meet her grandson.She did not frame it as a request exactly. She never framed anything as a request exactly. She said, "I think it's time, Evelyn," in the tone she used for statements that had already been decided and simply needed to be delivered, and I sat at my desk with my coffee going cold and thought about the woman who had called me the night of her public statement and said, I underestimated you. That was a mistake.I thought about that for exactly four seconds."Sunday," I said. "Two o'clock. My apartment. One hour."A pause. Vanessa was not accustomed to conditions. "Of course," she said, which was the closest she came to thank you, and we hung up.I told Charlie that evening. He was quiet for a moment on the other end of the phone. Then, carefully, "Do you want me there?""No," I said. "This is betwe

"It isn't a door swinging open. It's a road. And we're both walking it."He stayed.Not in the way that needs explaining, or the way that would require me to manage anyone's assumptions. He stayed because Leo woke at ten-fifteen disoriented and thirsty and calling for me, and Charlie was still on the balcony finishing his wine and heard it first, and by the time I got to the hallway Charlie was already crouched in Leo's doorway saying, "Hey. Hey, I've got you. Want some water?" in the low, unhurried voice he used with Leo now, the one that had no performance in it, and Leo, still half-asleep and entirely unselfconscious, said, "Yeah," and held out his hand, and Charlie went to the kitchen and came back with the water and sat on the edge of the bed while Leo drank it and then listed sideways and went back to sleep in approximately forty seconds, still holding the cup.Charlie extracted it carefully. Set it on the nightstand. Sat there for another moment in the dark.I watched from the