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Home / Romance / His Loss: My Ex Husband Wants Me Back / Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

Lahat ng Kabanata ng His Loss: My Ex Husband Wants Me Back : Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

27 Kabanata

Chapter One

Elara’s POVI'm here to make peace or to simply see to the end of this. I really didn’t care anymore, I just wanted to see him. Just one last time. And that's when the door opened quietly.Cassian Hale walked in dressed in a dark suit, an ideal tie, and his cold eyes that never for once flinched when they met with mine. He hesitated for a second when he saw me, and then went on to his desk.“I didn’t think it’d be you, yourself, who’d come,” he said coolly, as he dropped a pile of documents on his desk. “You filed it,” I said, my tone neutral, “and I thought that at least you would want to look me in the eye when you signed it.”He looked at the manila envelope that rested on the table between us the divorce papers. I had signed them last night. With my trembling fingers, while struggling to convince myself that it was nothing more than a piece of paper.He sat down, clicked the lid off a pen and signed, at the bottom of the pages without hesitating. One stroke after another

Chapter Two

Cassian’s POVThe very second she opened the door to get out, I thought that was it. But then the door creaked open a little wider, and she collided with someone.“Sorry again, Mrs. Hale” my lawyer, Davis, apologized and just had to change the topic. “Elara. Do you have a moment?” I almost rolled my eyes. He had a fancy for always having the wrong timing.Elara paused for a moment and then nodded once and as she moved out of the way, stepping back into the office with him. She didn’t even glance back at me.Davis entered with the folders I’d told him to get ready a week ago. The folder contained every asset broken down, the complete settlement offer and the goddamn penthouse I hated anyway but still bought it for her, because she said it was the right kind of light or some shit she could breathe in. She had no idea about the private account. It was an account I had created and hid away from her, years ago in her own name.Just in case.“Here’s the full agreement,” Davis said, sett

Chapter Three

Elara’s POVI didn’t cry. I couldn’t afford to, especially not where anyone could see. Instead, I walked. I didn’t know where I was going, though my feet moved with purpose. The truth of my reality did not hit me until I reached the curb. It was over.Not just the marriage, every single thing had just ended. The life I had built around someone who was never meant to have me. The me I’d known was gone, I’d been Cassian Hale’s wife, the face of every gala room, the name on every goddamn polished smile. I took out my phone and dialed the rideshare app. As I waited for the ride, I called my housekeeper. “Maria,” I said, my voice calm, “I want you to pack the brown luggage. Just the essentials. I’ll be home in an hour.”She hesitated before replying. “You’re leaving, ma’am?”I paused as I inhaled a deep breath. “Yes.” She didn’t ask why. She must have known because she had seen too much in that house to expect explanations.When I arrived at the penthouse, I went straight to bed. I di

Chapter Four

Elara’s POVAnd here it was again, that feeling that comes, just after sunrise. At first, I figured it was due to the remnants of the leftover croissant that I had eaten only a little of the day before. But then again, I thought of it as it wasn’t the first time this was happening. It began three days ago, and it came only in the mornings and just after I would wake up, and it didn’t linger. And yet I could not overlook the pattern.I sat on the edge of the guest bed in the small Parisian apartment I’d rented, with my hand on my stomach. The room was gloomy, and the curtains were still drawn. My skin felt funny and I felt a sour taste in my mouth.Needing some calm, I stood, went to the bathroom, and splashed cold water on my face. Once I had finished, I stared at my face in the mirror. I looked pale and had a bit of sleepy eyes. But it was difficult to tell if I was actually sick. My phone buzzed and Adrian's name flashed on the screen.“Are you still up for that coffee? I was a

Chapter Five

Cassian’s POVThe boardroom screamed wealth, as they talked about various things that covered, the numbers on mergers, expansion and projected acquisitions, but I had heard only a few or three words of what they were saying. My mind was elsewhere.“Mr. Hale?” the CFO’s voice called to me, snapping me out of my reverie. I blinked back and straightened. “Proceed.”I reclined slightly in my chair, with my hand slunged casually around my mouth. In here, I looked like a man that was cold, calculated and in control. But deep within me, I was detached.Beneath my flawlessly tailored suit and unwitherable facade … I could sense her presence, I could feel it. Elara.It had been weeks since she had placed the pen on the divorce papers. Weeks since she had walked out of my office with that same composure she wore like a second skin. Weeks since she walked out without screaming, and no tears other than silence. I should have felt relieved.Instead, I had not slept well since that very day.

Chapter Six

Elara's POV Paris did not care who I was. That was the first thing I learned about it. Nobody on the Rue de Rivoli knew my name. The woman at the boulangerie downstairs didn't know I had once stood in a Vera Wang gown at the Met Gala. The elderly man who walked his dog past my window every morning at seven didn't know I had been Cassian Hale's wife, the one he had traded in without blinking. Here, I was simply the quiet American in apartment 4B who paid her rent on time and smiled politely and ordered her coffee with two sugars. It was, I decided, exactly what I needed. My apartment was small. Smaller than the walk-in wardrobe at the penthouse. The walls were the colour of old cream, and the radiator clicked and hissed at odd hours of the night, but the window above the kitchen sink looked out onto a narrow cobbled street and caught the light just right in the late afternoon. That mattered. Light had always mattered to me, even when nothing else did. Weeks into her Paris li

Chapter Seven

Elara's POV The clinic smelled like antiseptic and fresh flowers, which was a strange combination. Someone had placed a vase of white tulips on the reception desk, probably to soften the room. It almost worked. I sat in a plastic chair with my coat folded across my lap and a clipboard of forms balanced on my knee, and I filled in every box with the careful handwriting of a woman who was holding herself together through the discipline of legible penmanship. Name. Date of birth. Address in France. The address was the apartment on the narrow cobbled street. Four weeks ago I hadn't known that street existed. Now it was the only address I had. Emergency contact. I stopped at that one. I thought about it for longer than I should have. My father was not an option — he had made that clear in the weeks after the divorce when he'd called to tell me that I had embarrassed the family and that I needed to come home and handle this quietly. I had not called him back. Maria the housekeeper wo

Chapter Eight

Elara's POV I almost said no. That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward. I had been standing at my kitchen window with my tea going cold in my hand, looking at the street below and feeling the particular weight of a Tuesday with nothing scheduled, when Adrian's message arrived.'Street market on Rue Mouffetard this morning. Come. I'll buy you something unnecessary.' I read it twice. Set the phone down. Picked it up again. The honest answer was that I didn't want to go anywhere. I wanted to stay in the apartment where it was warm and quiet and no one needed anything from me. I had been doing that a lot lately — finding reasons to stay inside, to keep the world at one remove, to exist in the small manageable radius of my desk and my kitchen and my window. But the apartment had been feeling smaller all week. And I had been inside my own head for three days straight, which was, by any measure, three days too many. I typed back: Give me twenty minutes. Rue Mouffetard on a w

Chapter Nine

Cassian's POV The scotch sat untouched for the entire flight. That was how I knew something had shifted. I had poured it out of habit the same way I always did on the jet, the ritual of a long flight, something to hold while the world moved beneath me. But I set it on the armrest and left it there and stared at it for the duration without wanting it. I kept thinking about the PI's voice. Two pink lines. She didn't cry. Didn't call anyone. Just sat there staring at the test. She hadn't called anyone. Of all the things he had told me, that was the detail that lodged itself in my chest and stayed there. Elara had been sitting alone in a foreign apartment with the result of a pregnancy test in her hand, and her first instinct had not been to reach for her phone. Not to call her father. Not to call a friend. Not to call me. She had sat alone with it. And I knew why. I knew exactly why, because I had made sure over the course of two years that she had learned not to bring things to

Chapter Ten

Elara's POV I didn't sleep well that night. Not because of the radiator, which had been clicking and hissing since October and which I had long since made my peace with. Not because of the street noise either, though a group of students had passed beneath my window at midnight singing something that might have been a French folk song or might have been entirely improvised — it was difficult to tell. I didn't sleep because of the way he had said my name. Hello, Elara. Two words. That was all. And yet I had spent the hours between midnight and four in the morning turning them over like stones, examining what was underneath them. The tone of it. The way his voice had done something careful and controlled that I recognised as the sound of Cassian Hale refusing to show his hand. I knew that sound. I had lived inside it for two years. I got up at half past four and made tea and sat at my desk and opened the green notebook and stared at the blank page for a long time. Then I wrote:

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