Chapter Seventy: The Speech

Amara was curled on the sofa with her feet tucked neatly beneath her hemline, her fingers wrapped around the good ceramic mug—the wide, chalk-colored one she always commandeered the moment she crossed the threshold, purchased years ago simply because a younger Eli had pointed a tiny finger at a shop shelf and uttered “that one” with absolute judicial authority. She was tracking Selene with the specific, unyielding focus she deployed whenever she had decided to be useful and refused to be redirected."Read it to me," she said.Selene stared at her laptop screen.The document open before her was a dense four pages, single-spaced, hammered out in raw fragments at two in the morning over the last three weeks. The leadership conference was in eleven days. The keynote address had been systematically dismantled and reconstructed seven times. Version Eight was currently blinking in the morning glare, and she was no longer capable of judging whether the rhythm was true, or how to bridge the ga

Chapter Seventy-One: The Night Before

Eli was asleep by eight-thirty.The evening had adhered to its established, non-negotiable sequence. First came the bath—an intricate logistical operation involving the plastic boats, complex diplomatic negotiations between competing deep-sea factions, and Patterson’s primary advisory role. Gerald the giraffe sat safely on the porcelain rim, his recent Connecticut experience having permanently expanded his relationship with moisture to the point where he no longer required a protective distance from the tub. Then came the book—the same text, maintained until further notice by strict executive decree. Finally, the specific, gradual surrender of a child whose physical machinery had decided the day was finished, even while his mind was still cataloging the fossil wood documentation to determine if Dr. Adaeze's soil composition theory was compatible with the brachiosaurus hypothesis.Selene sat beside the mattress until his breathing shifted.She waited until the internal processing stopp

Chapter Seventy-Two: The Stage

Five hundred and twelve women.That was the definitive number the foundation coordinator had rattled off backstage—not five hundred, five hundred and twelve, because twelve additional registrations had flooded the portal the week after Nadia's profile ran a second time. Someone had reshared the link with a simple, punchy caption: This woman is speaking next month. The post had accumulated forty thousand views in seventy-two hours.Five hundred and twelve women were waiting on the other side of the heavy velvet curtain.Selene stood in the wing of the main stage at the Meridian Conference Center. She noted the name without a shred of her old irony—the Meridian, the precise title of the international corridor that had initiated this entire five-year arc. She was discovering that the rigorous preparation for a momentous event and the actual, physical arrival at it were two entirely separate corporate exercises, and her career had only trained her for the first.Amara anchored the front r

Chapter Seventy-Three: The Backstage Door

He didn't just stand against the wall; he leaned his spine into the drywall as if trying to merge with the background, completely surrendering the center of the corridor. This wasn’t the commanding posture of a man who habitually occupied rooms as though his name were on the deed. It was the deliberate, quiet placement of someone who had decided, long before arriving, that his entire body needed to apologize for every space he had ever taken up before.He was still wearing the coat.Dark, heavy, absorbing the harsh fluorescent glare—the airy lightness of those park Saturdays was entirely gone, replaced by a dense fabric meant for late September. It was the meticulous choice of a man who had dressed carefully for an occasion where no seat was kept for him.She stopped in the doorway.They looked at each other.The backstage corridor stretched between them, stripped of all theatrical illusion—just the raw, functional utility of exposed piping running along the ceiling, flickering fluore

All Chapters of His Unwanted Heir: Chapter 71 - Chapter 74

Chapter Seventy: The Speech

Chapter Seventy-One: The Night Before

Chapter Seventy-Two: The Stage

Chapter Seventy-Three: The Backstage Door