All Chapters of Mr Ex, Call me your uncle's wife now.: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

I woke before my alarm, which was unusual, and lay there for a while staring at the ceiling while the light crept across it in slow gray bands. My phone was on the nightstand and it buzzed once. Then again. Then again.I reached over and turned it face-down without looking.I got up and showered and dressed and the phone kept buzzing against the wood and I stood at the sink with my toothbrush in my mouth and stared at my own reflection and tried not to think about anything at all. It didn't work. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the kitchen, the noodles going cold, the way he'd leaned across the island like it was the most natural thing in the world.I'm in love with you. That's why I came home.I spat into the sink and rinsed and wiped my mouth and picked up the phone. Seven missed calls. Two voicemails. A handful of texts I didn't open. I set it back down and went downstairs.The house was quiet. Ethan's study door was closed. I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window and dran

"Ethan. Shit, you scared me. How did you get in my car?"He didn't answer. He just looked at me with those steady gray eyes and his hands folded in his lap, and his voice was quiet when he spoke."The man at the hospital. The one you just walked past." He tilted his head slightly. "Who is he?""Ethan…”"I asked you a simple question,” he said. “Answer it.”I stared at him. My heart was still hammering from the jump scare and now it was hammering for a different reason, and I gripped the wheel with both hands and tried to get my breathing back under control."He's a friend," I said. "You might have met him before. His name is Nathan."Ethan didn't blink. Nathan. Was he at our wedding?”I looked at him. "Yeah. He and Sophie have been childhood friends.”"So you're hanging out with a friend at this hour of the night," he said. "At the hospital. Is that the new trend now?“What are you talking about?”“You were meant to come see your mother and head back home, Vivian.”"Ethan." I turned i

I walked out of the hotel room with my heart slamming against my ribs and Derek's last words echoing in my skull like a bell I couldn't un-ring.The one thing that still connects both of us.That was the same thing Sandra said. Why was this coming up now? When I thought I buried all of it.I didn't stop. I didn't turn around. I kept walking down the carpeted hallway with my shoes in my hand and my sweater half-tucked and my hair a mess, and I pressed the elevator button and stood there staring at the closed doors and tried to breathe.The doors opened. I got in. The doors closed.And then, alone in that little steel box, I let my face crumple for exactly one second before I pulled it back together.He knew. He knew about it. I'd spent four years burying so deep I'd almost convinced myself it had never happened… Derek knew. And he was going to use it.The elevator hit the lobby and I walked out through the revolving doors into the gray morning and the cold air hit my face and I stood o

The days after that night went by in a strange, quiet blur.Ethan went back to work on Monday morning. He left before I was up, and by the time I came downstairs the kitchen was already cleaned and his coffee cup was in the sink and the house had that hollow, polished feeling it got when he wasn't in it. I went to work. I came home. I answered emails and sat in meetings and pretended to care about quarterly reports, and every evening I ate dinner across the table from a man who had kissed me once and never mentioned it again.He didn't mention it. I didn't either. We just went back to the way things were… separate rooms, separate schedules, polite distance… except now there was something underneath it, some low hum I couldn't stop noticing. When he passed me in the hallway, I felt it. When he said my name, I heard it. When he looked at me across the dinner table with those steady gray eyes, I remembered the weight of his hand on my jaw and the way his mouth had felt on mine, and I h

The office was already humming when I walked in the next morning.I liked it that way. The early hours before the meetings started, when the floor was still half-empty and the coffee was fresh and I could sit at my desk and work through the backlog without anyone knocking on my door. I hung my coat on the back of my chair and pulled up the quarterly projections and buried myself in numbers for two solid hours.It worked. For a while, it worked. The columns and the spreadsheets and the little red flags I kept flagging for follow-up pushed everything else out of my head. No Megan. No Daniel. No Derek sitting on the edge of a hotel bed telling me I belonged to him. Just work.Then, at half past ten, there was a knock."Come in," I said, without looking up.The door opened and closed and someone walked in and I kept typing for a second longer before I glanced up… and my stomach did the thing.Daniel.He was standing in the doorway with a folder in his hand and his usual easy expression, t