บททั้งหมดของ He Chose My Sister, So I Married His Enemy: บทที่ 161 - บทที่ 170

The first intake happened exactly the way we'd designed it. I stood at the back of the room watching a woman walk through the resource pathway I'd argued for months to build, watching staff execute it without a single hitch, and for most of the afternoon I was too busy being happy to miss him properly.It worked, I texted Damien. First intake went through exactly the way we designed it.Of course it did, he wrote back.That sounded dangerously confident.I married the programme director. I have access to information.I smiled at my phone in the middle of the office, and someone caught me at it and asked what was so funny. I didn't explain. Throughout the rest of the day, his messages came steadily enough but shorter than usual, no photo of terrible coffee, no complaint waiting to be turned into a joke. I asked if it was a long day. Apparently, he wrote, and something in the word felt thinner than the ones he usually sent. I let it go. He was working. So was I.Our call happened right

"You have become intolerable since gaining access to that book," I told him the moment I answered. "You gave me evidence," he said, holding the page up to the camera. "I gave you literature." "With commentary," he said. "You wrote that love always costs somebody more. What did you think it would cost you?"I resisted a little, not because I was hiding anything, just because the answer felt personal in a way I hadn't prepared for. "Probably too much," I said. He waited, no pressure in it, and eventually I explained. I used to think love would cost independence, opportunities, the ability to say no, sometimes the version of myself other people found inconvenient."I thought eventually someone would ask me to prove I loved them by giving something up," I told him. "Work. A boundary. A piece of myself. And if I hesitated, that would mean I didn't love them enough.""And what do you think now?" he asked, not rushing to reassure me."I think love does cost things," I said, and watched him g

Define behave.I stared at it for exactly as long as I needed to construct an appropriately innocent response. Start by buttoning your cuffs, I wrote. They are buttoned, he sent back, and I looked at the photograph again, which somehow made it worse. Stop sending photographs you know are distracting. That sounds subjective. It isn't.I had a real day ahead of me, implementation logistics to review, staff meetings, a schedule sign-off that couldn't wait, and I told myself firmly that I was going to concentrate. I had built an entire career around concentration. Apparently marriage had introduced an international threat to it.The photos kept arriving anyway. Coffee on his desk, his hand visible around the cup. His jacket over the back of his chair. Sleeves rolled higher than they'd been that morning. I am documenting my day, he claimed. Your forearms are not a required part of the documentation, I wrote back. That sounds discriminatory.I decided if he was going to play that game, I wa

I woke with his words still sitting there, plain and unavoidable. Come to Singapore. Wanting to go did not mean I had to leave tomorrow. It meant I could finally look at the question honestly, so before I did anything else, I reached for my calendar instead of my phone.The next two weeks were dense, implementation work that genuinely needed me, a participant review I wasn't ready to hand off yet. But farther out, past the worst of it, there was a stretch that looked almost deliberately empty. Four days. I studied it for a while, checking what sat underneath it, asking myself honestly whether anything there actually required me specifically or just happened to have my name attached out of habit.Later that morning, a staff member brought me a routine sign-off, the kind of decision I usually made without thinking twice. I nearly took it automatically, then stopped myself. "What do you think?" I asked instead. She gave a sensible answer, better than what I'd have rushed through myself,

I sat in front of the booking page longer than the decision itself required, checking the dates once, then the arrival time, then the return flight, everything matching the four-day window I'd already cleared. My cursor hovered over the purchase button, not because I doubted Damien, but because the action itself was about to make the whole thing real in a way that talking about it hadn't. There was a difference between making room for four days on a calendar and buying a ticket that would actually carry me to my husband.I bought it.The confirmation landed in my inbox a moment later, my name, the dates, departure and return, and I read it twice before I let myself smile properly. I noticed, with a small quiet satisfaction, that I'd booked a return ticket too. I was going to Damien. I was also coming back, to the programme and the life I'd built here, and both of those things could be true at once without canceling each other out.I sent him the confirmation with no message attached,