Todos os capítulos de MARRIED TO THE MAN MY EX CALLS UNCLE : Capítulo 101 - Capítulo 110

By dawn, Maya had stopped counting the headlines. She sat curled on the study sofa with her laptop balanced on her knees, Elias beside her scrolling through his own phone with the particular grim focus of a man triaging a wound, and the numbers alone told the story before she'd read a single article in full — thousands of shares, hundreds of thousands of views on Margaret's confession video, the hashtag already trending in three countries."Look at this one," she said, turning her screen toward him. The headline read: *Elias Carter: Calculated Rise or Convenient Victim?* The article beneath it walked through his "engineered origins" with clinical detachment, raising questions about whether he'd orchestrated his own ascent to power rather than simply survived being swept into it."There's a dozen more like it," Elias said, not looking up from his own screen. "Sympathetic profiles of Margaret on one side, speculation about my supposed manipulation on the other. Nothing about Elena. Noth

The studio lights felt harsher than Maya remembered from any previous public appearance, or maybe it was simply the teleprompter glowing a few feet away, its careful, sanitized talking points scrolling in soft blue text that neither she nor Elias had written a single word of. She sat beside him on a low, tastefully arranged set built to look like a living room rather than a soundstage, their PR team hovering just out of camera range with the tense, hopeful energy of people who had rehearsed this moment a dozen times and were praying it went exactly as scripted."This interview is meant to humanize you both," Patrice had told them that morning, her tone brisk and clinical. "Warm, credible, relatable. Counter Margaret's narrative with something the public can actually root for. Stay close to the prepared answers. We workshopped every question in advance."Maya had nodded along at the time, exhausted enough to let the machinery of it carry her forward without much resistance. But sitting

Richard's apartment door stood ajar when Maya and Elias arrived, and the sight that greeted them inside was nothing like the composed, entitled man who'd spent the entire story sneering across boardroom tables. He was moving fast between rooms, stuffing clothes haphazardly into a single duffel bag, his usually immaculate appearance replaced by rumpled clothes and hollow, sleepless eyes that darted toward the door every few seconds like he expected someone to burst through it."Richard." Elias's voice was steady, cutting through the frantic energy of the room. "What are you doing?""What does it look like I'm doing?" Richard didn't stop packing, his hands trembling slightly as he shoved a fistful of shirts into the bag without folding them. "She's frozen everything. My accounts, my credit, even the trust fund that's supposedly untouchable under the family bylaws. I have maybe eleven hundred dollars in cash and a car that isn't even registered under my own name anymore, according to the

The news channel had been running the same grainy aerial footage on a loop for the better part of an hour — endless gray-blue ocean, a search-and-rescue helicopter banking low over whitecaps, a chyron scrolling beneath it that hadn't changed in twenty minutes: *SEARCH CONTINUES FOR MISSING AIRCRAFT.* Maya sat on the edge of the couch, Elias beside her, Damien pacing near the window, Richard slumped in an armchair with his arms crossed tight over his chest."If she's actually gone," Maya said quietly, "this ends without any of it mattering. No trial. No accountability. Every person she's hurt — Elena, Victoria, the witness, my mother — they never get real justice. She just disappears into the ocean and takes the whole truth down with her.""She's not dead," Richard said flatly, not looking away from the screen."You don't know that," Damien said."I know her." Richard's voice carried an edge Maya hadn't heard from him before — not his usual smugness, something harder and more certain.

Elias couldn't sleep. He sat alone in his study long after the others had retreated to their rooms, Margaret's voice still echoing in his ears — the smallest fraction of what I'm actually capable of protecting — turning the phrase over and over like a stone he couldn't stop worrying with his thumb.She hadn't said it as a threat exactly. That was what unsettled him most. She'd said it the way she said everything, with the calm, unbothered certainty of a woman who never bluffed because she never needed to.He pulled the accountant's leaked documents back onto his desk, spreading them out again under the desk lamp, searching for anything he might have dismissed too quickly in the earlier, exhausted read-through. Financial records. Shell company transactions. Wire transfers routed through entities with innocuous, forgettable names — Meridian Holdings, Northbridge Consulting, Aster Property Group.He almost missed it the first time through. A recurring payment, modest in size compared to