All Chapters of HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

84 Chapters

Chapter One: The Birthday He Forgot

The candles are still burning.Two little flames sitting in the center of the dining table. I have been watching them for a while now. Not because they are beautiful, but because watching them gives me something to do other than check the door.The food went cold an hour ago. The wine I opened at six has been sitting there so long it has stopped trying. Both plates still set. Both chairs still pushed in. The whole table exactly as I arranged it at five this afternoon when I was still the kind of woman who believed tonight was going to go the way I planned.I called him at seven. Five rings. Voicemail. I told myself traffic. A late meeting. Normal things. I called again at nine. Voicemail again. I told myself his phone is on silent, he is in a room full of people, he will walk through that door any minute and feel terrible about it and I will pretend I am not hurt because that is what I do. I make it easy. I make it fine.I smooth the front of the blue dress and reach for my phone one

Chapter Two: He Came Home With Her

I am still at the table when morning comes.I did not plan to stay. At some point in the night I told myself I would get up, clear the plates, blow out what was left of the candles, go upstairs and take the blue dress off and lie down like a person with some dignity. I told myself that somewhere around two in the morning and then again around four. I am still here at nine, sitting in the same chair, in the same dress, with the same two plates in front of me and the wax from the candles hardened into flat cold rings on the tablecloth. The wine has been open all night. The food on his plate has dried at the edges and smells of nothing anymore.I look like exactly what I am. A woman who waited.I hear the key in the front door at nine twelve.Damien walks in.He looks good. That is the first thing I notice and I hate that I notice it. Fresh shirt, jacket over one arm, hair neat, like a man coming back from something pleasant rather than a man who did not come home all night. He steps int

Chapter Three: A Guest Who Became a Queen

It had barely been an hour. Vanessa was already on the sofa, one hand resting on her stomach, completely at ease, like she had been sitting in that spot for years. And that was when I heard her voice carry in from the sitting room, warm and unhurried, the tone of someone who had already decided this was her home.“Claire, could you take my bags up to the master bedroom? Just set them inside the door, thank you.”I put the glass down.I walked to the kitchen doorway. Vanessa was at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the banister, already turning to go up. Claire, our housekeeper, was reaching for the bags. Damien was standing right there. Right there, three feet away, and he was looking at his phone.“Damien,” I said.He looked up.I held his gaze for a moment. Waiting. Giving him the chance to say something, anything, to tell Claire to leave the bags, to tell Vanessa that was not how things worked here, to remember, just for one second, that I existed in this house.He looked back do

Chapter Four: The Morning She Collapsed

I did not sleep that night.I lay in the guest room and listened to them downstairs, his voice and hers, easy and low, the sound of two people completely at home with each other, until the house finally went quiet somewhere past midnight. Then I stared at the ceiling until morning came and did it all over again the next day and the day after that.By the fourth day I had stopped eating properly. I knew that. I just could not make myself care enough to fix it. I would stand in the kitchen and open the fridge and look at everything inside it and close it again. I would make tea and forget to drink it. I moved through the house like something that had lost the instructions for being a person and was improvising badly.That morning Damien left with Vanessa at eight without a word to me.I heard them from the hallway. Her laugh. His keys. The door.I went to the kitchen. I stood at the counter. I filled the kettle.And then the room tilted and I grabbed for the edge and missed and that was

Chapter Five: The Baby He Wanted Gone

Sophia arrived within the hour of me calling her, walked through the curtain still in her work clothes, sat down beside me and took my hand and did not say I told you so even though she had every right to.Damien did not come back.Not that afternoon. Not that evening. Sophia was the one who stayed while the doctor came back and went over everything again. She was the one who asked the questions I could not find. She collected the discharge folder and the supplements and tucked them into her bag like she had been sent there specifically to do that.When it was time to leave she put her arm through mine and walked me out.She came home with me. Straight to the guest room, no discussion about it. She found blankets in the wardrobe and made herself a spot on the floor and when I told her to take the bed she looked at me like I had said something ridiculous and lay down and closed her eyes. I got into the bed and I lay there listening to her breathing slow into sleep and I thought about t

Chapter Six: The Dinner That Buried Her Alive

We did not speak for three days after that.Not a word between us. He gave me the two weeks he had promised and I gave him nothing back and we moved around each other in the house like two people who had agreed without saying so to pretend the other did not exist. Then on the third day he appeared in the kitchen doorway while I was making tea and said, without looking up from his phone, that his mother was hosting a family dinner on Saturday and I was expected to attend. Appearances had to be maintained until things were formalised, those were his exact words, and I was still his wife on paper and the Sinclairs did not air their business publicly before they were ready.I said fine.Saturday came. I put on the black dress, the good one I wore to Harold’s sixtieth and to every Sinclair event where I had spent an evening being pleasant and presentable and exactly what was required. I did my hair. I put on the pearl earrings Damien had given me on our second anniversary. I stood in front

Chapter Seven: The Anniversary Night She Finally Broke

I found him in his study that night when we got back from the dinner.I knocked and waited and he said come in and I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. He was at his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, the lamp casting everything in a warm light that felt wrong for the conversation I had come to have.“Your mother read out my medical file tonight,” I said. “In front of your entire family. She held it up and told everyone at that table that I was barren. That that was why you moved on.” I paused. “And you sat there and said nothing.”He leaned back. “I did not know she was going to do that.”“But you knew I was pregnant,” I said. You knew and you sat at that table tonight and let her tell your family that your wife could not give you a child.” My voice stayed steady. I was holding it very carefully. “Not one word, Damien. You did not say one word.”“My mother does not know about the pregnancy.”“I know she does not.”“And she does not need to know,” he said. “Because it is

Chapter Eight: The Silence That Said Everything

He never came that night. Not a knock. Not a footstep. Nothing.I lay in the guest room and listened to the house and somewhere around midnight I stopped listening and just stared at the ceiling and let that truth settle into me the way cold settles into a room when you stop pretending the heat is coming.He was not coming.Morning came gray and quiet and I made myself go downstairs because staying up there felt too much like hiding, and I was done hiding.They were in the sitting room.Damien on the sofa, laptop open, coffee on the table, completely at ease. Vanessa tucked against his side, her hand on his arm, saying something into his ear. He laughed. Low and easy, that private laugh he used when something was just for him. She looked up and saw me at the bottom of the stairs and held my gaze for exactly one second, no guilt in it, nothing, just the steady look of a woman who knew exactly where she stood. Damien did not look up at all.I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on.

Chapter Nine: She Left With What Mattered Most

The call ended and I just sat there holding the phone.Sophia had said okay. One word, no questions, no wait, are you sure, Just okay. Give me an hour. And something about that, the cleanness of it, the way she didn’t make me explain myself or defend the decision or perform the right kind of grief first, cracked something open in my chest that I had been holding shut since last night.I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth.The tears came quietly. Not the kind from last night, not the burning, helpless kind that Beatrice had stood there and watched with satisfaction. These were different. Slower. The kind that come after something has already broken and you are finally, finally alone with it.I let them fall. I did not wipe them.I reached for the pen on the nightstand.The divorce papers were still spread across the bed where I had left them, the settlement figure staring up at me like a verdict someone had typed without blinking. I looked at it for one more moment. Just one.

Chapter Ten: The Coldest Winter She Ever Survived

Sophia met me at the corner of the street.She had been calling since I left the house and I had not picked up, not because I didn’t want to hear her voice but because I needed those twenty minutes of walking to be mine, just mine, the city loud around me and my bag on my shoulder and my hands in my pockets and my feet moving forward. When she saw me turn the corner she didn’t say anything. She just looked at my face and then she pulled me in, both arms, tight, the way Sophia always held on, like she was trying to transfer something directly through the contact.I let myself lean into it for exactly three seconds.Then I stepped back.“I need somewhere to stay,” I said. “Just for tonight, I just need to think, I can come to yours and–”“Amelia.” She pulled a face. “My sister moved back in last month. Her and the two kids. I have a pullout couch and a six-year-old who wakes up at five a.m. I would give it to you in a heartbeat but you are pregnant and you need sleep and it is not–”“I

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