บททั้งหมดของ HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 60

We left the Sinclair Group building at half past twelve.Ethan held the door. Sophia was already talking about lunch before we reached the pavement. My legal team dispersed with the efficient quiet of people who had done what they came to do and had other places to be. Olivia fell into step beside me and said three things in quick succession about the afternoon's schedule and I answered all three without breaking stride because that was how we worked and it was one of the things I was most grateful for about her.In the car Ethan took my hand without looking at me and I let him hold it the whole way home.The city outside the window was doing what it always did. Moving and loud and entirely indifferent to the fact that we had just sat in a boardroom for ninety minutes and confirmed four resolutions and watched a man try to hold himself together in front of a room full of people who had read about his failures over their morning coffee."How do you feel," Ethan said."Done," I said. "W

Olivia's message came through while I was in the kitchen making Noah's lunch the morning after the regulatory hearing. One agenda item. Formal termination of Vanessa Moretti's advisory role and removal of every Sinclair Group affiliation, contract, access and document bearing her name.Nathan called the meeting for eight in the morning.I read it once.Put my phone down. Finished the lunch. Sealed the box. Drove Noah to school and listened to him explain at considerable length why his class had made the wrong decision about their end of term project topic and why democracy was, in his considered opinion, a flawed system in certain specific circumstances. I dropped him at the gate and watched him walk through without looking back, bag enormous on his small shoulders, already talking to someone before he had cleared the entrance.Then I drove to the Sinclair Group building.I had sat in that boardroom across that table through merger sessions and governance reviews and the kind of conve

(Amelia’s POV)Two days after the board meeting I was at my desk by seven.Not because I had been unable to sleep. Because the Paris campaign final approvals needed to be on Olivia's desk before eight and I had learned a long time ago that the work did not wait for the world to finish being dramatic before returning to its own requirements. The world could be dramatic and the Paris campaign could still need approving and both things were true simultaneously and only one of them was mine to manage.Noah had gone to school with his bag and his strong opinions about the breakfast I had made which he felt had not included enough of the things he liked and too many of the things he was indifferent to. Ethan had dropped him at the gate because he had a meeting on that side of the city and had appeared at the door at seven-fifteen with coffee from the corner place, handed it to me without ceremony, kissed me on the cheek and taken Noah with him.I had stood in the kitchen with my coffee in b

(Damien's POV)The house had been quiet for eleven days.Not the ordinary quiet of late evenings or early mornings. The specific total quiet of a house that has been emptied of something it contained for a long time and has not yet figured out what it is without that thing. Vanessa's coat was gone from the hook by the door. Ella's drawings had been taken from the fridge, not all of them, she had left three, the ones she had made specifically for me, a dog and a rainbow and something she had called a space rocket but that looked more like a banana with wings. Those three were still there. I had not moved them.I had not moved anything.The first few days I had filled the hours the way you fill hours when you do not trust yourself to stop filling them. Work emails from the laptop at home, which was the only access I had now that the company systems were restricted. Dr. Webb on Thursday. Two calls with Nathan about the regulatory timeline. A visit to Ella at Vanessa's sister's place on S

The Lumière international expansion event was on a Friday evening.The venue was exactly what Olivia had promised it would be when she had presented three options six weeks ago and I had chosen this one in forty seconds because sometimes you just know. High ceilings. The right light. The specific quality of a space that did not try to compete with what was being presented inside it but simply held it correctly.Two hundred guests. International press. Vincent Hale in the front row with the stillness of a man who had stopped needing to perform significance a very long time ago.And Noah.He had asked to come. Not the whole evening, he understood that the whole evening was a grown-up thing and he was six and there were limits, but the first part. The speech part. He had made his case at breakfast three days before with the methodical thoroughness of someone who had been building the argument for longer than breakfast and had simply been waiting for the right moment to present it. His mo