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Todos os capítulos de HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Capítulo 101 - Capítulo 110

167 Capítulos

Chapter One Hundred and One: What Peace Looks Like

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

Chapter One Hundred and Two: One Year Later

One year after the wedding I was in three meetings before nine a.m.Not because the company required it. Lumière did not need managing in the way it had once needed managing, the daily vigilance of a founder who understood that the whole thing existed because she had willed it into existence and would collapse the moment she looked away. It was past that now. Twelve countries. A team of four hundred and seventeen people who knew what they were doing and why and who had been hired specifically because they could be trusted to keep doing it without her in the room.The three meetings were because Olivia had scheduled them and Olivia's scheduling philosophy was that if something could be done it should be done and if it could be done before nine it should be done before nine.I had stopped arguing about this approximately two years ago.Sophia called at ten from Milan.Not about work. Or not entirely about work. She called the way she had been calling every Sunday and most Wednesdays sin

Chapter One Hundred and Three: The Questions Noah Keeps Asking

(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

Chapter One Hundred and Four: The Family Tree

(Amelia's POV)A note from Noah's teacher arrived on a Friday.Not in an envelope. Just a folded piece of paper tucked into the front pocket of his school bag in the specific position that meant he had known it was there and had made a considered decision not to mention it on the walk home.I found it while I was unpacking the bag.Unfolded it.Mrs. Adeyemi wrote in the careful measured language of a teacher who had learned across many years of experience that the notes sent home to parents required a particular calibration, neither alarming nor dismissive, precise enough to be useful.She had given the class a family tree project.Standard assignment. Four generations, both sides, presented however the student chose. Most had done posters. Some had done digital presentations. One child had apparently attempted a song, which Mrs. Adeyemi described as ambitious.Noah had done his in the notebook.Twelve pages. Annotated. Cross-referenced. With footnotes.She had written: In twenty-two

Chapter One Hundred and Five: What Harold Does

(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

Chapter One Hundred and Six: Building After Being Broken

(Amelia's POV)I had sent the reply to Damien and then sat at the kitchen table for a long time.The pride goes both ways.I had meant it. That was the thing I sat with the longest. Not whether I should have sent it or whether it was too much or whether a more guarded version of myself from seven years ago would have sent three words instead of a full sentence. Just the fact that I had meant it. That somewhere across the years of building and refusing and arriving I had found something in Harold Sinclair that was worth being proud of, the late imperfect trying of a man who had stayed too quiet for too long and had decided, from a hospital bed, that the time left was better used honestly than carefully.Ethan had found me still at the table at eleven.Had made tea.Had sat beside me without asking.Which was, as always, exactly right.The invitation to keynote the Global Business Leadership Conference had arrived six weeks earlier.I had looked at it for three days before I said yes.N

Chapter One Hundred and Seven: Damien in the Audience

(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

Chapter One Hundred and Eight: The Letter

(Amelia's POV)It arrived on a Tuesday.Not by email. Not through a lawyer or a formal channel or any of the professional architecture that had surrounded every piece of communication between us for the past two years. Just an envelope on my desk when I arrived at the office, placed there by Olivia who had accepted delivery and had brought it up without a word and had not asked anything about it, which meant she had recognised the handwriting on the front and had decided this was not a morning for questions.My name. In handwriting I recognised from signed documents.I sat down.Looked at it for a moment.Then I opened it.Two pages. Handwritten. The same handwriting throughout, no corrections visible, which told me this was not the first draft but the final one, the version that had been arrived at after however many attempts had been necessary to produce something this clean.I read it from the beginning.He did not open with an apology. He opened with a statement of intent. He was

Chapter One Hundred and Nine: What Noah Says

(Damien's POV)It was Noah's idea to try somewhere different.Not the bookshop, not the museum, not the botanical garden. A coffee shop on a street I did not know, in a neighbourhood I had not spent time in, that he had apparently discovered on a walk with Ethan and had decided was worth investigating properly. He sent the address through Amelia with the specific minimal information of someone who had decided the destination was self-explanatory and did not require elaboration.I found it on a Saturday morning.Small. The kind of place that had three tables and knew everyone's order and had been there long enough that it had stopped trying to be anything other than exactly what it was. Noah was already at the corner table when I arrived, notebook open, hot chocolate in front of him, the newspaper he had apparently decided to read folded beside it.The newspaper.I sat down."You are reading the paper," I said."I am broadening my information sources," he said, without looking up from

Chapter 110: The Life She Built

(Amelia's POV)I was in the kitchen at six forty when Noah appeared in the doorway, hair not yet brushed, wearing yesterday's socks with today's uniform, holding a shoebox as if it contained something that might combust if tilted."The diorama," he said. By way of explanation, as if the shoebox had made everything self evident."The rainforest one," I said."The one about symbiotic relationships in the Amazon canopy," he said. "Ms Ferris said diorama makes it sound like a school project. It is a school project. I do not see the distinction.""Neither do I," I said. "Sit down."He sat down and set the shoebox on the table with the particular care of someone who had spent three evenings gluing moss to cardboard and did not intend to lose it to a careless elbow now."The fungus is coming off the tree," he said. "The big one. Root system."I looked at the shoebox. A cotton wool cloud sagged over one corner. A green pipe cleaner, meant to be a vine presumably, had come loose at one end and

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