Todos os capítulos de HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Capítulo 171 - Capítulo 180

I did not react.I did not, for a full second, allow my face to do the thing my body wanted it to do, because I had spent seventeen years learning that the first reaction to bad news is a currency somebody is always trying to collect, and I was not going to spend a single coin of mine at eleven forty seven at night on a phone call."Ruth. Say the whole thing. What is he claiming, what is the evidence, and where is the leak coming from.""He is claiming that the pregnancy is the result of an affair, that Ethan is not the father, and that a private DNA sample obtained from a discarded prenatal record confirms it. He is producing a laboratory report, purportedly from a Zurich clinic, dated three weeks ago, that names a third party as the biological father. The report is fabricated. The clinic exists. The letterhead is real. The signature at the bottom belongs to a doctor who is on Richard's payroll and will testify to whatever he is paid to testify to. Two outlets have the story. One is

I sat down in the chair.I did not adjust the microphone. I did not smile. I did not wait for the room to quiet, because a woman who waits for a room to quiet is telling the room she needs its permission to begin, and I had not walked into that atrium at ten oh one in the morning to ask anyone in it for permission.I waited three seconds.The room quieted anyway."Good morning. My name is Amelia Carter Vale. I built this company. I am the chief executive of it. I am the majority shareholder of it. And I am a wife, a mother, and a woman currently in the second trimester of a pregnancy. I would like you to note the order in which I chose to describe myself. It matters."I let that sit in the room for a beat."An hour ago, a private citizen in Zurich published a fabricated laboratory report and delivered a rehearsed televised statement alleging an affair, a false paternity, and a pattern of deception in my marriage. I am not going to spend a single sentence of this press conference addre

Damien's POVShe looked at the opposing counsel. She looked at Nathan. She looked at the small silver device Nathan had already produced from an interior pocket and was holding, screen down, on the ledge of the witness box in front of me. Then she looked at me."Mr. Sinclair. Is the individual on this recording the same individual currently identified as a coconspirator in the federal filing before this court.""Yes, Your Honor.""Is that individual represented by counsel.""He is, Your Honor. His counsel was formally notified of this exhibit at nine o'clock this morning. Notice is on file with the clerk.""Play it."I picked up the device. I unlocked it with my thumb. I set it on the ledge in front of the microphone, and I pressed play with the specific quiet of a man who had spent ten days hoping the recording would never be needed and now understood that the fact he had needed it, on this exact afternoon, was the entire point of having made it.Marcus's voice filled the courtroom.

Damien's POVI was in the second row.I had not been called to testify a second time. I had come as a private citizen and listened to a seventy one year old man tell my ex-wife, on the record, that he had begun spending money to end her the year our son was conceived. I had not moved through the sentence, because moving would have been an interruption Amelia did not need from me.But the sentence had told me something.He had said the year Noah was conceived.Not the year Amelia had left. Not the year she had returned. Not the year Lumière had become a company. The year Noah had been conceived. Which meant Richard had been watching me first, and Amelia only through the shape of me, and everything I had believed for four weeks about the operation being about her and only her was, at some level I had not been ready to accept, incomplete.I went back to the vault that night.Nathan came with me. He did not ask why. He knew.There was one drawer in Harold's private archive I had never ope

Amelia's POVNathan yielded the floor before he had begun.He turned to the judge. He asked, in the careful voice he used when he had prepared a moment and understood it was not his to deliver, for the court's permission to allow the injured party a closing statement in her own voice, in place of counsel. The judge looked at me. She nodded once.I stood.I walked to the small space in front of the bench. I did not look at Richard. I did not look at the gallery. I looked at the judge, and then, past her, at the American flag on the wall behind her, and then, down at my hands, and then, finally, at the room."Your Honor. Members of the gallery. Mr. Blackwood."I paused."I would like to say one thing before this court closes today, because I understand it is going to be repeated in every news outlet in this country tomorrow morning, and I would like the sentence to be one I chose, in a voice I own, in the order I meant it."The room was very still."I did not build my company on a perfe