All Chapters of Married For Revenge, Pregnant With His Regret : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

He was cornered and he knew it. Cornered men do stupid, dangerous things.The federal agents had been Sofia's contact's arrangement, a cultivation of three years that had paid its dividend in two men who stepped into position with the unhurried precision of people who had been briefed thoroughly and who understood exactly what they were there to do and when to do it. Victor Kane had seen them when he made his move toward the exit. He had stopped. He had turned back. He had sat in his chair in the fourth row with the specific, contained quality of someone who has just had a significant option removed and is rapidly recalculating.What remained in his recalculation, I knew from the financial documentation Daniel had assembled, was very little. The Meridian approach had collapsed that morning, his legal team's call arriving at eleven oh three, twelve minutes before the press conference began, too late to change his strategy and just early enough to confirm that he had been walking into t

She sat in front of a camera and told the truth for the first time in her life. She cried. I don't know if it was real. But the facts were real.The recording had happened in the green room at ten forty-eight on the morning of the press conference, in the eighteen minutes between Sofia saying set up the camera and the press conference beginning. I had been present for all of it, standing in the corner of the room while Lila sat in the single chair that Sofia had positioned in front of the camera with the practiced, unhurried efficiency of someone who had set up testimony environments before and understood the specific requirements of a recording that needed to be legally defensible.No lawyers coaching her. I had said this in the green room and I had meant it and Sofia had enforced it with the quiet authority of someone who understood what uncoached testimony looked like and what coached testimony looked like and the difference between them when a document was placed in front of a jud

I didn't plan to show it to him. And then I did. Because I was tired of carrying it alone.This was four days after the press conference. The world had continued its rearrangement in those four days with the efficient, relentless momentum of something that has been set in motion and cannot now be stopped. Victor Kane's preliminary federal hearing had been scheduled. The financial press had published twelve major pieces, eleven of them favorable, the twelfth one written by someone who had been on Kane's payroll and whose connection to him had been documented within forty-eight hours of the piece running, after which the publication had issued a retraction and the journalist had issued a resignation. The merger was suspended pending the legal proceedings, which was expected and accounted for in the back door structure Daniel had built into the terms.Lila had retained her own attorney and was cooperating with the federal investigation in exchange for consideration on the charges. Sofia

He didn't say anything. He just poured me a drink and sat across from me and waited.Adrian had stayed in New York for four days after the press conference. Not because he had planned to, his diary had him back in London by Friday evening, but because the kind of person he was did not leave in the middle of something when leaving felt like a choice made for comfort rather than necessity. He had rescheduled his London meetings. He had not mentioned this to me directly, I had found out from Daniel, who had mentioned it in the casual, informational way of someone passing on a fact they assumed I already knew.I had not already known.I had thought about what it meant for approximately thirty seconds and then thought about seventeen other things and filed it in the place where I kept things that required attention I did not currently have available.He called on Friday evening, the day after the photograph, the day after Chapter 67 had happened in my office and I had told Charlie I would

I put Leo to bed, read him two stories, and sat in the dark for an hour after he fell asleep.The stories were his choices, as always. The first was about a small dragon who was afraid of fire, which had been Leo's favourite for three weeks and which I had read with sufficient frequency that I no longer needed the book to recite it, though I held it anyway because Leo noticed if I held it with less attention than the text deserved and had once paused a story to tell me that I was clearly not engaging with the material. The second was one he had selected from the shelf with the focused deliberateness of someone who had made a specific decision rather than a casual one, a book about rivers, about how rivers were formed and where they went and what they carried with them from the mountains to the sea.I had not seen this book before. I did not know he had it.I read it carefully.When both stories were done and Leo was settled and Gerald was in his correct position on the shelf with the