All Chapters of MARRIED IN HATRED: FELL IN LOVE AFTER SHE LEFT?: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

JOLENE'S POVThe boardroom looked different from the visitor's side than it had the last time I'd sat in it, though nothing about the room itself had changed. Same glass walls. Same long table. Same silver-haired chairman flipping through a folder like he already knew what was in it.Danforth sent two representatives, a man named Reeves and a woman named Kessler, both dressed like the meeting was already decided in their favor. Kessler set her own folder down first, opened it to a single page, and slid it across the table before Whitcombe had even called the session to order."Nine point four percent," she said. "As of this morning. We're not here to negotiate a hostile position, Mr. Henderson. We're here to discuss an orderly transition of certain divisions before the market decides for you.""You're here," Jake said, "because you think a family in the middle of a scandal is too distracted to notice what you're doing until it's finished." He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.

VICTOR'S POVThe memo confirming my reinstatement arrived by email at seven in the morning, three lines long, signed by Whitcombe himself, informing me that my voting rights were restored effective immediately, thirty days ahead of the original ninety-day timeline the board had set months earlier. I read it twice, waiting to feel something larger than I did. Instead I felt only the quiet, practical relief of a man getting back a tool he needed for a job that was still very much unfinished.I didn't call anyone to share the news. I made coffee, sat at the small desk in the guest house I still hadn't fully moved out of, and picked up the phone to call a contact I hadn't spoken to in nearly two years, a woman named Priya who owed me a favor from a much older, much smaller crisis in my life, back before Maya, before Elena, before any of the wreckage I'd spent the last several months trying to clean up on someone else's behalf."I need everything you can pull on a firm called Danforth Hol

JOLENE'S POVVictor returned from Portland four days after he left, no warning beyond a short message saying he'd landed and would be at the estate within the hour, and something in the careful, measured wording of it told me before he even walked through the door that whatever he'd found had cost him something to bring back.He gathered us in the study that evening, Jake, Rebecca, Hailey, and me, laying out everything he'd learned with the same methodical precision he'd used months earlier presenting the evidence against Maya's stolen thesis, though this time his voice carried an edge underneath the calm that I recognized as personal in a way the earlier presentation hadn't been."The funding behind Danforth traces to a trust controlled by a man named Desmond Carter," he said, sliding a folder across the desk toward Jake. "Maya's father. Estranged from her most of her life, according to what little is publicly known about him, but clearly not estranged enough to stay away when she ne

JOLENE'S POVThe call came during Stacy's routine follow-up scan, the kind of appointment we'd both stopped bracing for months ago once her recovery settled into something steady and predictable. I was at the estate when her name lit up my phone, and something in the timing of it, midweek, mid-afternoon, outside her usual schedule of check-ins, made my stomach drop before she'd even said a word."It's not an emergency," she said immediately, clearly having rehearsed that exact sentence to stop me from panicking before she got any further. "But they found something on the scan. A complication near the original surgical site. Not urgent, the doctor said, but not something we can just watch and wait on either. She's recommending a second procedure within the next two months."I asked every question I could think to ask, the kind of questions I'd learned to ask over years of hospital hallways and doctors who spoke carefully around the actual weight of what they were telling you, and by

JOLENE'S POVI found the envelope by accident, the same clumsy, unplanned way Jake had found the empty spaces in my jewelry box weeks earlier, and there was something almost funny about the symmetry of it, if I'd been in any state of mind to appreciate the irony while it was actually happening.I'd gone into the study looking for a stapler, of all things, needing to fasten together a stack of paperwork for my residency application before the office closed for the day, and the safe behind Logan's portrait was standing slightly open, not fully closed the way Jake normally kept it. I told myself I shouldn't look. I told myself that for almost a full minute, standing in the doorway with the stapler already in hand, before curiosity or instinct or something less easily named won out over good judgment.The envelope sat alone inside, my father-in-law's handwriting unmistakable across the front, two words that made my whole chest go tight the instant I read them. *Second Will.*I knew immed