บททั้งหมดของ HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: บทที่ 71 - บทที่ 80

(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

(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

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

(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

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