Todos los capítulos de He married me to ruin my husband : Capítulo 21 - Capítulo 30

Richard's eyes opened just after six. The room was still dim, blinds cracked only enough to let in a thin grey line of morning."Ivy." His voice came out cracked. "You're still here.""Where else would I be?"He tried for a smile. It got about halfway there. "Fainting like an old man in his own kitchen.""You didn't faint, Dad. You had a cardiac arrest."The almost-smile disappeared. "I know what caused it."She waited. He stared at the ceiling tiles for a long moment."Talk to me," she said. "Actually talk to me this time. No half-truths.""Robert Cross didn't just humiliate me. That's the story I've told you my whole life. It's not everything.""Then what's the real one?""The land deal I brought him fifteen years ago." His fingers picked at the edge of the blanket. "I inflated the valuations. I told myself I'd fix the numbers once the deal closed. It wasn't a mistake, Ivy. I knew what I was doing.""How much?""Enough that if the board had seen the real figures, I'd have been looki

Richard came home on a Thursday, complaining about hospital food the entire ride, which Ivy took as a good sign. She moved the rest of her boxes into Xavier's penthouse that same weekend.He'd cleared half the master closet without being asked. Drawers emptied, shelf space made. "You didn't have to do all this," she said, standing in the doorway, watching him hang the last of her dresses."I wanted it done before you got here.""It's strange, seeing my things next to yours.""Get used to strange, ma'am." He said, straightened a hanger that didn't need straightening. "That's the arrangement now."She discovered, within the first week, that he worked past midnight most nights, three monitors, headphones in even when nothing was playing, a level of focus that made interrupting him feel like breaking into a locked room. He also discovered she cooked when she was anxious, rearranged his kitchen twice without asking, hummed under her breath doing dishes without noticing she did it."You

Ivy didn't sleep well after that conversation with Elena; her mind kept circling the phrase ‘debts, tied up in old business dealings’ until it became impossible to ignore.She waited two days before she started digging, telling herself she was satisfying curiosity, not actively investigating her own husband behind his back. By the third day, sitting alone in the penthouse while Xavier ran a full day of board meetings, she gave up pretending otherwise and opened his home office laptop, the one he'd given her access to weeks earlier for household matters, back when the boundary between his business and their shared life had seemed simpler.She started with public records first. Cross Holdings' filings looked clean on the surface, with revenue steady and growth consistent with what she'd heard Xavier discuss in front of investors. But something about the older filings, the ones from just after his father's death, caught her attention. A line item buried in a footnote, referencing a sub

An invitation arrived on Ivy's phone directly. A text from an unfamiliar number, polite and formal enough that she read it twice before scrolling down.“Mrs Cross, my name is Marcus Reyes. I understand you may not recognise it yet, but I believe you'd benefit from a conversation before this week's meeting between myself and your husband. I'll be at the Whitmore Hotel lounge tomorrow at eleven, if you're willing.”She read it three times, weighing whether to tell Xavier immediately or handle it herself first. She thought about the two weeks she'd already given herself over the Ashworth debt, the quiet test she was still running to see whether he'd come to her on his own.That unresolved tension made her decide, almost without fully articulating it to herself, that she wanted to meet Marcus alone. If he was going to try something, she wanted to see exactly what it was before Xavier's presence shaped how he chose to play it.She didn't tell Xavier where she was going. She told him she ha

"Then tell me," Ivy said quietly. "All of it."Xavier told her everything Rosa had shared that afternoon, laying it out plainly, without softening any part of it. Camila's years of struggle afterwards and raising Elena alone."She died six years ago," Xavier said, his voice hoarse. "I knew that much, at least. I've been supporting Elena financially since before that, actually.I told myself sending money quietly was enough. It wasn't. I know that now."Ivy sat across from him, absorbing every piece, watching his face carefully for anything that didn't match what he was telling her. She found nothing out of place. He spoke with the exhaustion of someone who had spent years avoiding a conversation he could no longer avoid.“Marcus told me I wasn't the first woman you'd used a relationship with to get something you needed. Marriage or otherwise." She kept her eyes on the table. "He wouldn't give me details. He just gave me a name. Elena's mother. And let me fill in the rest myself.”"I