All Chapters of HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

84 Chapters

Chapter Seventy-One: Sophia Knows Everything

Sophia arrived at my door on Saturday morning with the energy of someone who had been sitting on something since the night before and had given herself until a reasonable hour before showing up to explode about it.Eight forty-seven was apparently a reasonable hour.I opened the door in my robe with my coffee and she was standing there in a coat I had not seen before, full makeup, keys dangling from one finger and the expression of a woman who had made a decision and was extremely pleased with herself about it."Come outside," she said."Sophia I literally just woke up.""You have coffee," she said. "You are fine. Come outside."I went outside.Parked directly in front of the building, occupying the spot with the confidence of a vehicle that knew it was the main character, was a car. Not just a car. A white Mercedes. Brand new, the kind of new where the light hit it differently from everything else on the street, the kind of new where you could practically smell the decision from the

Chapter Seventy-Two: The Governance Audit Results

(Amelia's POV)By Sunday evening Noah had presented Mount Dramatic four times.Once to me. Once to Ethan. Once to the both of us together because he felt the first two individual performances did not capture the full collaborative audience experience. And once, inexplicably, to Sophia who had stopped by to return a scarf and had been handed a printed programme and seated on the sofa before she fully understood what was happening to her.She had given a standing ovation.Noah had accepted it with the composure of someone who had expected nothing less.Monday arrived and I was almost sorry to see the weekend go, which was not something I said often about Mondays but the weekend had been the particular kind that reminded you why you were doing all of it. Sophia and the Mercedes and the breakfast in my robe. Noah and the volcano and Ethan asking questions with the seriousness of an academic panel. Small perfect ordinary things that cost nothing and meant everything.Then Olivia put the go

Chapter Seventy-Three: He Tries Again

(Damien's POV)Nathan came over on Wednesday evening with the signed documents and a bottle of whisky he did not open.He set both on the kitchen table. Sat down. Looked at me with the expression he wore when he was carrying something he was going to let me arrive at myself rather than handing it to me directly because he had learned across twenty years that the things I arrived at myself were the ones that actually stayed.I picked up the documents.Three pages. Clean language. Precise conditions. I read the first page and understood immediately that this was a return but not the return, not the full thing, not my title and my office and my company back the way it had been. Executive capacity. Reporting to the advisory council. Six months probationary period. Quarterly performance reviews. Major decisions requiring sign-off.I read the second page.The sign-off requirement had a name attached to it.Advisory Council Chair. Amelia Carter.I set the page down.Picked it back up.Read i

Chapter Seventy-Four: Noah Asks More

(Amelia's POV)Noah's volcano presentation was on Thursday morning.Front row. I had promised and I kept it, which meant I was sitting in a primary school assembly hall at nine fifteen on a Thursday between a woman I had never met who smelled strongly of lavender and a man who fell asleep eleven minutes in and woke himself up with his own snoring during a presentation about tectonic plates. Noah was third on the programme. He walked to the front with his printed notes and his model, which the school had apparently allowed him to bring in despite it being, as his teacher had diplomatically described it in the Wednesday email, quite large, and he presented for nine minutes with the confidence of someone who had rehearsed in front of a live audience four times and had received a standing ovation at least once.He was magnificent.Objectively, completely, magnificently nine years old and certain of his facts and unbothered by the size of the room or the man snoring in the front row.Ethan

Chapter Seventy-Five: The Meeting Without Lawyers

Three weeks after I told Nathan's office not yet, my personal phone rang at eight in the morning and it was not Sophia, it was not Ethan, it was not the school calling about another volcano-adjacent incident.It was Damien.I was standing at the kitchen counter in the middle of making Noah's lunch, one hand on the bread and the other reaching for the phone and his name on the screen doing the thing his name had stopped doing for a while now, which was nothing. Just his name. Just letters on a screen. And yet.I answered."Amelia."His voice was different from how I remembered it on the phone. Quieter. Less of the authority that used to sit in it automatically the way expensive furniture sat in expensive rooms, placed there so deliberately you stopped noticing it was a choice. This was just his voice. A man's voice on a Tuesday morning."Damien," I said.A pause. Short. Like he had prepared for voicemail and was recalibrating for an actual person."I know you said not yet," he said. "A

Chapter Seventy-Six: The Weight of One Word

I Watched the last remaining structure of his composure come apart quietly, the way something well-built came apart, not all at once but in the specific order that revealed exactly where the weight had been sitting. His jaw. His shoulders. His eyes, which had been red and barely holding when he asked me, stopped holding entirely.He did not make a sound.The tears came down his face the way the truth came. Without permission. Without timing. Just arriving because they had been waiting long enough and the door was finally open and there was nothing left to keep them behind.He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth.Breathed.Kept both hands flat on the table.And I sat across from him and I let him have it because it was his to have. Every second of it. He had earned every second of this particular grief and I was not going to shrink it for his comfort or mine.After a moment he looked up."Why," he said. His voice was wrecked. Quiet and completely wrecked. "Why did you never tell

Chapter Seventy-Seven: Telling Ethan

Olivia did not say anything else for the rest of the drive.She did not need to. She had said the thing, he just nodded, no argument, and I had said yes twice and after that the car had simply moved through the city with both of us inside it carrying what we were carrying and not requiring the other one to carry it differently.She pulled up outside my building at quarter past six."Go home," I told her. "I mean it. No emails tonight."She looked at me. "Are you sure you are alright.""Yes," I said. And I meant it. Not in the way I had meant things six years ago when yes meant I am performing fine for your benefit. Just actually yes. I am standing. I said the thing. The world did not end."Go home Olivia," I said again.She nodded. And then, because she was Olivia and could not entirely help herself, she said, "You did well today." Quietly. Like she was not entirely sure she was allowed to say it and was saying it anyway.I got out of the car before she could see my face do the thing

Chapter Seventy-Eight: Damien and Harold

(Damien's POV)I called my father at seven in the morning.No preamble. No building to it. He picked up on the second ring and before he could say anything I said the thing that had been sitting in my chest since the moment I walked out of that hotel conference room and driven home and sat in a dark apartment alone with it for the entire night."He is mine, Dad," I said. "She confirmed it. Yesterday. To my face."The line went quiet.Not the quiet of surprise. The quiet of a man who had been carrying a half-knowing for months and had just been handed the full thing and needed a moment to receive it properly."Come over," I said. "Please."He was at my door by nine.He sat across from me in the living room with his coat still on because Harold Sinclair never assumed more space than he had been given and right now that small detail, that careful quality of not presuming, made something in my throat tighten in a way I had not expected.I told him everything.The hotel room. The way I had

Chapter Seventy-Nine: The Thing Amelia Never Said

(Amelia's POV)Noah came home from Sophia's at eight.He walked in with the specific energy of a child who had spent several hours being thoroughly entertained and was now running on the last reserves of it, coat half off before he reached the door, shoes abandoned somewhere between the entrance and the kitchen, already talking before I could ask how it went.The car, he informed me, had been named Gerald.He had campaigned strongly for something more distinguished but Sophia had been very attached to Gerald and in the end he had respected her vision even though he personally felt Gerald lacked authority as a name for a vehicle of that calibre.I sat at the kitchen table and listened to every word.Ethan leaned against the counter with his arms folded and his eyes doing the thing they did when Noah was talking and he was trying very hard not to smile too visibly because Noah took his opinions seriously and deserved to have them received seriously.Gerald, Noah concluded, was going to

Chapter Eighty: What Noah Decides

Sophia left just before two in the morning.She had helped me up from the kitchen floor, made fresh tea that I actually drank this time, and stayed until the something that had been releasing inside me had released enough that being alone with it felt manageable rather than impossible. She hugged me at the door the way she hugged me when words were not enough and she knew it. Properly. Both arms. No rushing.Then she was gone.I went to bed and slept deeply and without the circuit running for the first time in longer than I could clearly remember.I waited three days after that.Not because I was not ready. Not because the words were not there. But because Noah deserved the right moment and the right moment was not the morning after the kitchen floor. It was not the day after that either, when I was still finding my feet in the new shape of things. It was the third day, a Saturday, when the apartment was unhurried and Noah had finished breakfast and was sitting at the kitchen table dr

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