The Wife He Took For Granted のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 31 - チャプター 40

Elena waited until the office had emptied out before she called, not because she needed privacy exactly, but because she wanted to hear her own voice clearly when she said yes, without the hum of the drafting room underneath it. She sat at her desk with the lights low and Diane Hartwell's card propped against her monitor, the paper gone soft at the corners from how many times she'd picked it up and set it down again since the offer first landed on her desk, and when the line connected, Diane answered on the second ring like she'd been waiting with the phone in her hand. "Elena. I was hoping it would be you." "I wanted to give you an answer before the board meeting," Elena said, and then, because there was no elegant way to delay it any further, "I'd like to accept." There was a small pause on the line, warm rather than uncertain, and then Diane laughed, the sound of someone who had been holding her breath without quite admitting it. "That's wonderful news. Genuinely. I've been tell

Adrian picked up on the second ring. Elena watched his face while he listened, and she didn't like what she saw there. His jaw went tight. His eyes moved to her once, then away, like he needed a second to figure out what to do with what he was hearing. "Say that again," he said into the phone. A pause. "When did this come up?" Another pause, longer this time. "Okay. I understand. We'll talk in the morning before the vote." He set the phone down slow, like it might go off again if he moved too fast. Elena waited. She had learned not to fill his silences anymore. She used to rush in and guess what was wrong, and half the time she guessed wrong too, which only made things worse. Now she just waited. "That was Grant, from legal," Adrian said finally. "He wanted to flag something before the board sees it tomorrow. Someone on the board pulled your name and Hartwell's name and put them next to mine. They're asking whether my vote on Meridian should count, given that my wife is about to ru

Elena called Diane from the stairwell, the one place in the building where the signal held steady and nobody could hear her through the glass walls of the offices. Diane picked up before the first ring finished. "Tell me you already knew about this," Diane said, skipping past hello. "Tell me legal briefed you before you signed and I just missed the memo somewhere." "I found out twenty minutes ago," Elena said. "Marcus pulled it while doing due diligence on the Meridian filings. It's old. It's from a firm Adrian's father ran before Whitmore Holdings existed in its current form." There was a pause on the line, the kind Diane used when she was deciding how much to say out loud on an unsecured call. "The board's read on it right now isn't kind," she said finally. "They're wondering if you knew about this clause before you ever came to us. If Riverside was picked as your signature project partly because it happened to sit on land with strings already attached to it." Elena's grip on th

Adrian stood at the head of the boardroom table with both pages of his father's letter in a plain folder, no binder, no polish, just paper the way it had come out of the box the night before. He'd thought about typing up a summary, softening the language, leading with the part about Walter Osei and the promise before easing into the part about Whitmore's long-term interest. He'd decided against all of it somewhere around two in the morning, lying awake next to Elena, who had stayed up with him longer than she needed to just so he wouldn't be doing the deciding alone. "I want to read you something my father wrote almost thirty years ago," he said, and the room went quiet the way rooms do when people sense they're about to hear something that wasn't in the agenda. He read both pages. He didn't skip the second one. He watched the board's faces shift as he went, watched a few of the older members who'd known his father nod slowly at the first page, then go very still at the second, doi

Elena burned the rice. Not a little burned thoroughly, unmistakably burned, the smoke alarm going off twice before Adrian came jogging into the kitchen in his socks, waving a dish towel at the ceiling like he was flagging down a plane. "I thought you were the good cook now," he said, once the alarm quieted and the windows were open and the smell had started, grudgingly, to fade. "I am the good cook," Elena said, staring into the pot like it had personally betrayed her. "This is a fluke. I was on the phone with Diane about the Ashford proposal and I forgot rice needs, apparently, attention." "Ashford proposal beat the rice." "Ashford proposal beat the rice," she agreed. Adrian peered into the pot, wrinkled his nose, and set it in the sink to soak, already pulling his phone out to look up the number for the Thai place around the corner. It was such a small, unremarkable thing, watching him do that without a single comment about how she should have been paying more attention, witho