บททั้งหมดของ HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: บทที่ 141 - บทที่ 150

Nathan took the phone out of my hand before I could do anything with it."Do not answer that," he said. "Whatever you are about to type, do not. He wants a reaction. The picture is the bait and your reply is the hook, and I am not going to sit here and watch you swallow both at four in the morning."He was right, and I hated that he was right, and I let him keep the phone until the worst of the impulse had drained out of me.We did not sleep. Nathan made coffee neither of us drank, and we sat in the study with the photograph of a dead man between us, staring at Marcus Vale's face and at the framed picture of Amelia and Noah in his hand.By the time the sun came up over the river, Nathan had gone home, and I had made three decisions, and I had written them down, because there is a certain kind of decision that only stays made if you commit it to paper before your feelings have a second run at it.One. I would not tell Amelia about Marcus yet.Two. I would not go back to Ashford Lane. N

I stared at my own wrist as though it belonged to a stranger.The crescent had been there my whole life. It was in the christening photographs my mother kept on the second landing, the ones she had never taken down even in the years she and I were barely speaking, and I had walked past that wall ten thousand times without once looking at the small pale mark on the infant in the silver frame. Now a woman I did not remember had turned my hand over in my own living room and shown it to me like evidence, and I could not stop looking at it."That is not proof," I said finally. My voice sounded strange in my own ears. "You know that. A birthmark is not proof of anything. Thousands of people have marks like this.""In that exact place. That exact shape." Claire did not push it. She let the two facts sit on the table between us and did not add a third, which was, I would come to learn, very much her way. "You are right. It is not proof. That is why I am going to ask you for the only thing I c

The name did not make sense, so I made Olivia say it out loud."Read it to me. The whole thing. Firm, partner, everything."She read it. It was the same firm. It was the same named partner who had filed Serena's first affidavit, and now his name was sitting under a line that said Claire Bennett had retained him six weeks ago, three weeks before Damien knew she existed.I put both hands flat on the table and breathed."That is not two women with the same problem," I said. "That is one lawyer running two women.""That is what it looks like."Ethan was already awake. He came down in the same t-shirt from an hour ago, took one look at the two of us hunched over the screen, and did not ask a single unnecessary question. I turned the laptop toward him. I watched him read the name. I watched him understand it."Serena and Claire share counsel," he said slowly. "The mistress who tried to destroy your marriage with a fake child, and the woman who just surfaced at Damien's door with a real one.

The television was still on when Nathan called me back.I did not answer it in the hall. I walked into the study, closed the door behind me, and let Amelia keep watching the news cycle chew on my signature in real time, because there was nothing on that screen that would help her and Nathan's voice in my ear told me there was going to be something on the phone that would."Ethan. The first laboratory. I have a name.""Say it.""Kevin Morris. Junior technician. He was the sample handler on Serena's original paternity test, and I had a private investigator sitting on him from the second Doctor Reyes confirmed the fraud. He has been drinking in the same bar every night for six days, and tonight, forty minutes ago, he told the barman he was going to lose his job by Friday. That is not the sentence of a man with a clean conscience. That is the sentence of a man waiting for a door to be kicked in.""Where is he now.""Still at the bar. West Side. My investigator is at the far end of the roo

Amelia's POVThe video landed in my phone at eleven forty seven, forwarded from Damien with a single line beneath it that said, You know one of them.I sat down on the edge of the bed with Ethan already asleep beside me and I played the video with the volume off, and I watched Serena Cross sit across from a woman I did not recognize for forty minutes, and I did not recognize her the second time through either, and I very nearly closed the phone before the last three seconds ran.Then the door opened, and the man who was waiting to hold it open for Mara Vane turned his face into the camera for a full second before he walked out, and my breath left me.I knew him.I had hired him.Not Ethan. Me. Seven years ago, at Lumière, when the company was still eight people above a laundromat, I had hired a soft spoken young man named Julian Hart to run our first supply chain, and three years ago I had personally recommended him to Ethan's firm when he told me he wanted to move to something quiete