RECLAIMING MY LIFE FROM THE UNTOUCHABLE CEO のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

Hazel's POVI almost withdrew from the auction when I saw her name on the list, my finger hovering over Professor Larsen's email for a long moment before I closed my laptop entirely and sat with my hands pressed flat against the cool kitchen counter, willing my pulse to slow. It was Professor Larsen who talked me out of it, over tea in her cramped office that smelled permanently of old paper and stronger coffee than she ever admitted to drinking, stacks of student theses forming their own small, precarious skyline along the edges of her desk. "You built this foundation from nothing," she said, setting her cup down with the particular firmness of a woman who had spent thirty years learning exactly when firmness was called for, "in six months, while defending your own name in the press. If you let one woman's presence chase you out of a room you have every right to stand in, you hand her a victory she hasn't earned, and worse, you teach yourself that she still has that kind of power ove

Hazel's POV The hospital waiting room smelled like antiseptic and cold coffee, and I sat in a plastic chair that did nothing for my back, still wearing the emerald dress, the hem stained dark at the edge where I had knelt beside Julian on the ballroom floor. Every few minutes a nurse walked past without looking at me, and every time the double doors swung open my whole body jolted forward before I caught myself. Adrian sat two chairs away, close enough to be there, far enough to give me room, and he didn't try to fill the silence with comfort he didn't actually feel. Professor Larsen had gone to find water none of us wanted, just to have something to do with her hands. I kept replaying the sound the beam made, that low groan before it gave way, and Julian's voice cutting through the noise of two hundred strangers to find me first. He hadn't shouted for security. He hadn't shouted for himself. He had shouted my name like it was the only word he still remembered. I pressed my palms agai

Hazel's POVDetective Reyes called three days later, while Julian was still recovering at the London flat I hadn't lived in with him but had somehow ended up sharing with him anyway, in that strange limbo of not-quite-together we'd fallen into since the hospital. I put the call on speaker because Julian asked me to, sitting stiffly upright on the couch with his arm in a sling, and I sat across from him, my hands folded tight in my lap, bracing for whatever came next. The flat still smelled faintly of the takeout we hadn't finished the night before, and outside the window a light rain had started against the glass, steady and quiet, the kind of ordinary weather that made the coming conversation feel even stranger by comparison."We found the driver," Reyes said. "The one from five years ago. He's cooperating in exchange for a reduced sentence, and he's confirmed what we suspected. He wasn't hired to kill anyone. He was hired to force a car off the road hard enough to scare Julian Danie

Hazel's POVAdrian found me two days later at the small café near Professor Larsen's office, the one where we used to sit after seminars and argue gently about restitution theory and whether art could actually repair what violence had broken. He ordered his coffee the way he always did, too much sugar, and sat down across from me like nothing between us had shifted, though we both knew everything had. The café was nearly empty at that hour, just the low hiss of the espresso machine and a student in the corner marking up a stack of papers, and I found the ordinariness of it strangely comforting, a small, quiet room where nothing was on fire."You don't have to say it," he said, before I'd found the words myself. "I've known for a while, I think. Longer than you have, maybe.""Adrian—""You don't owe me an apology, Hazel." He turned his cup slowly on the table, not quite meeting my eyes. "I watched you in that ballroom when the beam came down. I've never seen you look at anyone the way

Hazel's POVThe divorce papers were still sitting in my bag three weeks later, unsigned, folded at the same crease they'd held since the night I drafted them in anger, and I hadn't told Julian they were still there. It felt strange to carry both things at once, the papers and the balcony confession, the itemized bill for five years of service and the memory of his mouth finally saying I love you like he meant it. I wasn't afraid of my own answer anymore. I was afraid of what it would look like to everyone else if I gave it. Some mornings I would open my bag for a pen or a notebook and catch sight of the folded edge of those papers and feel a strange jolt, like finding a photograph of a person I no longer quite recognized as myself.The board of Daniel Holdings had already started circling, uneasy about the scandal, about a CEO photographed leaving a courthouse with a wife he'd once told closed-door meetings he stayed with out of obligation, a phrase that had somehow leaked to a busine