Lahat ng Kabanata ng Mr. CEO, You Lost Me Too Late: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

CHAPTER TWENTY TWOSaturdayAria's POVI was up before my alarm.I lay there for a few minutes pretending I wasn't and then gave up and got out of bed. The morning was grey and quiet.I showered and stood in front of Nina's mirror and looked at myself for a moment. My stomach had started to show. Not dramatically. Not in a way a stranger would necessarily notice. But I noticed. A small, firm roundness that had not been there a month ago and that I caught myself looking at sometimes with an expression I could not immediately name.I put on a dress I liked. Not because it was breakfast with Alex. Because I liked it. I had been wearing things I liked more lately and I was not going to examine that too carefully.Nina was awake and in the kitchen when I came out. She looked at me once, top to bottom, and turned back to the stove."You look nice," she said, in a tone carefully engineered to sound like she was not saying anything at all."Thank you," I said, in a tone equally engineered to

CHAPTER TWENTY FOURFriday MorningAria's POVThe article went up at seven in the morning.I knew because Adeyemi had told us it would and because I had been awake since five pretending to fall back asleep when of course i know i won't. When my phone lit up at seven with a message from Sandra that said simply it's live I was already sitting up.I read it in bed.All of it. Every word. Thomas Adeyemi wrote the way Sandra had described him, carefully and with precision, the kind of writing that doesn't reach for drama because the facts are already dramatic enough on their own. He laid out six years of financial movement through Cavendish Corp's subsidiary accounts. He named Margaret. He named Raymond. He quoted the regulatory body's confirmation that an inquiry had been opened. He provided the paper trail in enough detail that it was impossible to read as anything other than what it was.He mentioned Alex once, in a single paragraph near the end, and what he said was that Cavendish Cor

CHAPTER TWENTY SIXThe Day AfterAria's POVI woke up thinking about his hand.Not in a dramatic way. Just the simple fact of it. The way it had felt to reach out in that corridor without planning to and find his hand there and have him not pull away or make it into something it wasn't. Just two people standing next to each other in a difficult moment. Just that.I lay there for a while and let the morning come in slowly.Sixteen weeks on Monday. The baby had been moving, or at least I thought she had, a faint fluttering that Dr. Mensah had said I might start to feel around now. I wasn't entirely sure yet if what I was feeling was her or just my own body doing what pregnant bodies did, but I had been paying attention to it too often that it was becoming its own quiet ritual.I pressed my hand flat against my stomach.Something pressed back.Very faintly. So faintly I might have imagined it.I didn't think I imagined it.I lay very still for a moment and felt it again and something mov

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHTClara's Wedding DressAria's POVClara called on a Tuesday and the first thing she said was, "Don't hang up.""Why would I hang up?""Because what I'm about to ask is insane and you have every right to say no and hang up on me."I sat down on the edge of Nina's couch. "Clara, just ask.""I'm getting married."I blinked. "What?""Tobias. You met him once, at Christmas three years ago, he barely said anything, you probably don't remember him.""I remember him. He spent forty minutes telling your mother about wine pairings and she hated every second of it.""That's him." A pause. "We got engaged in March. We were going to wait until everything with Mama settled down but honestly, Aria, it's never going to settle down, so we picked a date. Six weeks.""Six weeks.""Six weeks." Another pause, longer this time. "I need a dress. And every designer in this city either won't take my calls anymore because of who my mother is, or they will take my calls and charge me triple

CHAPTER THIRTYThe HearingAria's POVSandra told me I didn't have to come."It's procedural," she said. "You won't be called. You don't need to be in the room.""I want to be in the room.""Aria.""I sat through three years of being told what was happening to my own life by other people, Sandra. I'm not doing that with this part. I'm going."She didn't argue further.I wore the navy dress I'd bought for the Maison Elara meeting, the one that made me feel like someone who belonged in rooms instead of someone tolerated in them. Nina offered to come. I told her no, this one I needed to do without an audience of my own, and she understood that in the way she understood most things about me without needing it explained.Alex picked me up at eight."You didn't have to drive me.""I know.""I could have taken a car.""I know that too." He pulled out into traffic. "I wanted to."We didn't talk much on the way. There wasn't a version of small talk that fit a morning like this and neither of u