Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 31 - 챕터 40

We sat across from each other and pretended we were strangers. We almost succeeded.The conference room I had chosen was on the thirty-second floor, the same floor as the larger room where the merger meeting had happened, but smaller, more controlled, with a table built for six rather than twenty and a window that faced east rather than south, which meant the afternoon light came in at an angle that fell across the table between us rather than behind either of us. I had considered this. Light behind you was an advantage in certain kinds of meetings. Light between you was something else. Something more honest.He arrived at one fifty-eight. Two minutes early, which told me he had been in the building longer than that, waiting somewhere below until a time that was not presumptuous but was not late. He came in without his executive team, which I had not specifically requested but had hoped for, because a man who arrives alone to a meeting he has requested is a man who understands that wh

He sent me a gift. A very expensive, very threatening gift.It arrived on a Tuesday morning, which I had come to understand was Victor Kane's preferred day for things he wanted to appear casual. Tuesday suggested midweek efficiency, something dispatched between meetings, an afterthought. Nothing that arrived on a Tuesday from Victor Kane was an afterthought. Everything he did was considered in the specific, architectural way of a man who understood that the appearance of casualness was itself a form of power.The box was matte black. No return address. Delivered by private courier to the Carter and Reeves offices, addressed to me specifically, by name and title. Jessica brought it to my office with the careful neutrality she brought to everything unusual and set it on my desk and left without comment, which I appreciated.I did not open it immediately. I looked at it for a moment, at the precise edges of it and the quality of the matte finish and the small white card tucked under the

He called me. Not Sofia. Me. I almost didn't answer.The number came up on my phone at seven forty-three on a Wednesday evening, while I was at my desk reviewing the financial documentation Sofia had pulled on Kane's equity positions, the gaps she had been looking for beginning to show themselves in the patient, incremental way that gaps in carefully constructed things always did eventually. I had the phone face-up on the desk because Leo was at Sofia's mother's apartment for the evening and I was waiting for the check-in call that came every night at seven thirty regardless of where he was, which was a protocol Leo had proposed himself at age three and a half on the grounds that it was, his word, efficient.The check-in had come at seven thirty-one. Leo had reported that one of the cats had knocked Gerald off the coffee table and that he had explained to the cat, clearly and at length, why this was unacceptable. The cat had been unrepentant. Otherwise everything was fine.So when the

He reached across the table to point at something in the contract and his hand almost covered mine. Neither of us moved.It was eleven forty-seven at night. I know the time because I had checked it twenty minutes prior and had told myself, at eleven twenty-seven, that we would wrap up in thirty minutes and I would be home by midnight and Leo's overnight at Sofia's mother's apartment would not extend into an inconvenient morning. It was now eleven forty-seven and we had not wrapped up and the thirty minutes had dissolved the way time dissolves when two people are working through something complicated and the complexity keeps generating new complexity and neither of them is willing to be the one who calls it before it is actually finished.The conference room had emptied at nine. Both our teams, his and mine, had reached the natural endpoint of their respective contributions and had gathered their things and exchanged the professionally warm farewells of people who have been in the same

He said it like it cost him something. It did.It was a Tuesday evening, three weeks before the arena, and Adrian was not supposed to be in New York. He was supposed to be in London, where his firm had been operating from a new Mayfair office for the past eighteen months, where his calendar was full and his presence was expected and where, by every reasonable assessment of his professional obligations, he should have been. He was in New York because he had flown in that morning for what he described in his text as a brief logistical matter requiring my direct input, which I had accepted at face value because Adrian did not manufacture logistical reasons and because the merger due diligence had generated several items that genuinely warranted in-person discussion.We met at my office at six, after the building had mostly emptied. He came in with the particular focused energy of someone who has been on a transatlantic flight and has converted the fatigue of it into something useful rath