Semua Bab Divorced After One Night: The Plus-Size Ex-Wife’s Revenge: Bab 81 - Bab 90

I hadn't planned to return to the diner, especially with everything still unresolved between Daxton and me. But the next morning, Dana gently encouraged me to go, she watched as I paced around the small apartment with Rowan fussing against my shoulder."You can't carry two unfinished conversations at once," she said, taking Rowan from my arms so I could actually think. "Pick one. Finish it."I chose Peggy, mostly because it felt more within my control than waiting on Daxton's silence.She was behind the counter when I walked in, the moment she saw me, her expression changed. For a second, I could see both hope and fear on her face before she quickly composed herself and became more guarded."I didn't think you'd come back," she said."I almost didn't."I sat down at the counter instead of a booth, close enough that we could talk quietly without an audience, and she came around, drying her hands on her apron, waiting."I need you to understand something," I said. "What you did wasn't

The next morning, he asked me to wait at the co-working space instead of going to the office with him. I understood why without him having to explain....whatever was about to happen between him and Vanessa needed to happen privately, without other people watching.....especially since Vanessa had spent weeks seeing me as a threat to something she wanted.I sat at my usual desk, Rowan with Dana for the morning, and tried to focus on work I couldn't actually concentrate on, checking my phone every few minutes like that would somehow make the meeting resolve itself faster.He called a little after eleven."It's done," he said, and something in his voice, tired but resolute, told me it hadn't gone easily. "Can you meet me for lunch? I'll tell you everything."We met at the same café where, months earlier, he had told me that he saw the real me, no matter what I was hiding or protecting myself from. It felt strange to be there again now, with all my secrets finally out in the open between

The meeting ended without a formal decision about Vanessa's future, Patricia insisting the board needed time to discuss it properly, separately, without either Vanessa or myself in the room. Daxton walked me out afterward, his hand steady at my back, both of us quiet until we reached the elevator."That could have gone worse," he said, once the doors closed."It could have gone better too," I said honestly. "Nothing's actually resolved, she still knows everything, she's still angry and a board decision doesn't erase either of those things.""No," he agreed. "But it does mean she's not going to have institutional cover to keep going after you. Whatever she does next, she'll be doing it as someone the board is already watching carefully."I wanted that to feel like more of a relief than it did.We didn't have to wait long to find out what came next. Two days later, while I was at my desk finishing a contract review, my phone rang with a number I didn't recognize."Is this Anne Grayson?

Daxton came by that evening the way he did most evenings now, letting himself in with the spare key I'd given him a few weeks earlier, a small, ordinary trust I still hadn't fully gotten used to extending to anyone.Rowan was fussing in his crib when Daxton arrived, two months old now and still working out the difference between hungry and simply wanting to be held, and Daxton went straight to him without even setting his bag down, lifting him out and settling into the chair by the window with the easy, practiced confidence of someone who'd been doing this for months instead of weeks."Hey, buddy," he murmured, warming a bottle with one hand while balancing Rowan against his shoulder with the other. "I know, I know. Bottle's coming."I stood in the kitchen doorway and watched them, the particular ache in my chest that had become familiar these past months, love and something more complicated tangled together so tightly I'd stopped trying to separate them.Daxton knew everything. He'd

I didn't sleep. Dana's question just sat there in the dark, over and over, until the sky outside went gray.I got up before Rowan woke, made tea I didn't drink then sat at the table and made myself actually answer it instead of running from it.Did I love Jason, once? Yes. But it was fast...one dinner, one night, a handful of honest moments squeezed between months of two strangers being polite to each other. I'd fallen for a feeling more than a person. For what he might become to me, not what he'd already proven himself to be.Daxton was different. There was no single perfect night with him. Just month after month of small things, he fixed my sink, he sat with me through a panic attack at two in the morning, he built a crib on a Saturday and stayed for lunch like it was nothing, he showed up at the hospital twice, once for a false alarm, once for the real thing, and both times he didn't have to be asked.That wasn't the same shape as what I felt for Jason, it didn't need to be. Slow a