Semua Bab HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Bab 101 - Bab 108

We spent three days by the water.Not far. Not an international flight or a resort that required a packing list. Just a house two hours north that Ethan had found and booked with the same quiet competence he brought to everything, three days by the water with Noah at my mother's and the world at a manageable distance and nothing required of either of us except the simple unhurried business of being married.It was exactly right.The house had a garden that ran to the edge of the water and a kitchen that got the morning light and a bedroom with windows on two sides and Ethan, who was the kind of person who read actual books on actual holidays rather than checking his phone, who made coffee at seven and brought it to wherever I was without being asked and who said almost nothing for three days that was not either true or necessary.I called Noah every evening.He was fine. He was more than fine. He was at my mother's eating things she should not have been feeding him and watching films

(Damien's POV)Nathan caught up with me in the car park after the quarterly review.Not because he had anything urgent to say. Just because he had been watching me across that boardroom for two hours and had apparently arrived at a conclusion he wanted to test before the week moved on without him."Lunch," he said. It was not a question.We went to the place on Fifth we had been going to since the early Sinclair Group days. It had not been a working lunch for about six months, which neither of us had commented on and which both of us understood meant something about where things had gotten to.We ordered. Settled.And Nathan looked at me across the table with the expression he wore when he had been filing something quietly for a while and had decided today was the day to open the file."You are different on Saturdays," he said.I looked at him."Before and after," he said. "The Saturdays when you have the museum or the bookshop or wherever it is this month." He set his fork down. "You

(Damien's POV)Noah showed me the family tree at the next meeting.We were at the bookshop again, the green door and the lamp and the hot chocolate that had become as fixed a part of our routine as the questions and the notebook, and he had placed it on the table in front of me with the specific deliberateness of someone who had been waiting for this moment and had decided the bookshop was the correct venue for it.I read it carefully.All twelve pages. The pencil lines clean and precise. Both branches labelled. Both complete.I found my name on the second page.Biological Father. Damien Sinclair.And beside it, in brackets, in Noah's handwriting, which I had been reading across enough notebook pages now to recognise as immediately as my own: currently being determined.I sat with that for a long moment.Noah was watching my face.I knew he was watching my face and I understood why and I did not try to manage what my face was doing because he deserved to read it accurately and I was d

(Damien's POV)Nathan had not told me he had tickets until the morning of the conference.He mentioned it the way he mentioned things he had arranged without asking because he had already decided the answer was yes and had simply been waiting for the right moment to let me know. We were in the car on the way to an eight a.m. meeting and he said it into the middle of a sentence about something else entirely, the way he had been inserting the important things between the procedural ones for twenty years."Amelia is keynoting the Leadership Conference today," he said. "I have two seats in the fourth row."I looked at him."You bought conference tickets," I said."Months ago," he said."Without telling me," I said."I was telling you now," he said. "We have time after the morning meeting."We had time after the morning meeting.The conference centre was a building that understood the weight of what it held, large and well-lit, the specific quality of a space designed for people who were d