All Chapters of His Loss: My Ex Husband Wants Me Back : Chapter 21 - Chapter 27

Elara's POVI didn't tell Cassian about the call that night.Not because I was protecting Juliette — I had no interest in protecting Juliette. Not because I was frightened. I had meant what I said at the café: she called because she was losing, and losing people made noise, and noise was not the same as power.I didn't tell him because I wanted to sit with what she had said first. Alone. Without his reaction in the room with me, without having to manage what her words did to his face while I was still figuring out what they did to mine.You're just the thing he didn't value until it was gone.I made tea. Sat at the desk. Turned the sentence over like something I had found on the street — examining it, testing its weight, deciding whether it was worth keeping.The thing about Juliette was that she wasn't stupid. That was what made her dangerous. Stupid people threw wild accusations that were easy to dismiss. Juliette threw the ones that were adjacent to something true, close enough to

Elara's POVHe knocked at seven forty-five in the morning.I know the time because I had been awake since six, sitting at my desk in the specific restless state that came from a night of almost-sleep — the kind where you drifted under and kept surfacing, never quite reaching the depth where real rest lived. I had been staring at the Renaud document for forty minutes, adding nothing, just reading what was already there and feeling the shape of it press against something I couldn't yet name.Then the knock.I opened the door in my cardigan and socks and the expression of a woman who had not prepared for company.He was holding a paper bag. Two coffees balanced in a carrier. He had not shaved. He looked, if anything, worse-rested than me, which was a feat I would have considered impossible twenty minutes ago."I was in the neighbourhood," he said."It's seven forty-five in the morning.""The boulangerie opens at six." He held up the bag. "The croissants

Elara's POVThe Fontaine apartment was on the fourth floor of a building in the seventh arrondissement that had the quiet confidence of old money — the kind that didn't need to announce itself because it had been there long enough to stop caring whether anyone noticed.I noticed anyway.Not with envy. Something more complicated than that. Six months ago I had lived inside rooms like this — the particular hush of high ceilings, the art chosen for meaning rather than investment, the light that came through tall windows and fell across parquet floors in a way that made everything look like the opening shot of a film. Six months ago that world had been my address.Now it was a Tuesday morning appointment.I rang the bell.The woman who opened the door was somewhere in her sixties — elegant in the French way that looked effortless and was almost certainly not, with the direct gaze of someone who had spent decades in rooms full of people trying to impress her and had long since lost interes

Elara's POVThe sunflowers were in a glass on my kitchen counter.Yellow, cheerful, entirely ordinary — the kind of flowers that made a room feel like something good was happening in it. I had put them there without thinking and then stood back and looked at them and thought about the flower stall at the far end of Rue Mouffetard, past the cheese vendor and the bread woman, at the end you only reached if you went there specifically.I had not mentioned I liked sunflowers.I had not mentioned flowers at all.I turned from the counter and opened my laptop.Adrian had arrived that afternoon with the easy manner of someone doing a small, thoughtful thing — sunflowers in one hand, his laptop bag over his shoulder, already talking about a tutoring platform he had found that he thought could help me build a proper client profile."You should be charging more," he said, settling at my kitchen table and opening his laptop. "The market rate for private English tutoring in Paris is significantly