Five Years On The Run: The Billionaire's Secret Baby のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 131 - チャプター 140

Colette's The eight days left a mark on me.Not a permanent one, but the kind that changed the trajectory of something fundamental inside me.I was more careful with Oliver now. Not in the guarded way I had been at the beginning, when I had been protecting myself from the possibility of getting hurt. This was different. It was the caution of someone who had learned that the person she loved was capable of things she never expected, capable of making choices that could surprise her in painful ways.I could tell he was more careful with me too.I saw it in the way he moved around me, the extra second he took before making decisions that involved me. The way he asked instead of assumed. The way he paused before speaking whenever a conversation brushed too close to the wounds we'd left on each other.It wasn't comfortable.But it was real.Far more real than the effortless perfection we'd been pretending to have before.The eight days also gave me something I hadn't expected.Clarity.Th

Colette's pov I found out who ran the account posting the "she won't last" quote about me through the least dramatic means possible. Priya showed up at seven in the morning with a screenshot and the kind of certainty that suggested she had found something significant. She had spent three weeks quietly running the account's followers against every name in my professional and personal space, and she had finally gotten a hit.The account belonged to a woman named Diane. Diane had been Oliver's personal assistant for six years.I sat down when Priya told me that, actually sat down hard on the edge of my desk because the world suddenly felt less solid than it had a moment before. Diane wasn't just any assistant. She managed Oliver's calendar and his schedules and his appointments. She sometimes went to his house for work-related emergencies. She knew certain things about his personal life that only someone in her position would have access to.I had met Diane multiple times over the month

ColetteThe breaking point came four days after the Diane revelation, from a direction neither of us had anticipated.A prominent business publication had run a piece on Oliver. It was all about his profile, his rise in the business world, his reputation as a formidable businessman. And there had been a section about his personal life. A section that didn't look like it had been written by someone from the inside who knew intimate details about us. No, it looked like it had been written by someone who had been watching everything that had been happening and had merely gathered it all into a narrative.But the section about me. The section about me described me as a sharp operator who had managed to turn a hotel turnaround into something considerably more personal. The implication was clean and devastating. It suggested that I had used my professional position to gain access to Oliver, that I had engineered a way into his life through calculated moves and strategic decisions.By the

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTY NINE: ASKINGColetteHe arrived at seven exactly and I was not ready at all.It wasn't because I had forgotten the time or because I had decided to make him wait. It was because I had been on a call with a friend I had run into days ago at the grocery store and we had kept talking until we both forgot what time it was. We had been catching up on years of distance, on all the things that had happened while we weren't in each other's lives, and suddenly it was seven o'clock and I was still standing in my kitchen in work clothes with half-cooked food sitting on the stove.When the doorbell rang and I peered through the peephole to see Oliver standing there, I had gasped. But at the same time I didn't want to keep him waiting, so I had answered the door with the phone still in my hand, still on the call with my friend.He had taken in the scene all at once. The half-cooked food on the stove. Me still in work clothes. The chaotic look of someone who had been w

Colette Priya called me later that evening, right after I'd gotten home and kicked off my shoes and poured myself a glass of wine I hadn't yet touched. "I have it," she said, without any of her usual preamble, which told me before she said another word that whatever she'd found was serious enough to skip the small talk entirely. "Tell me." "It's not hidden," Priya said. "That's the first thing. Nobody buried this. It's just old enough that it doesn't come up in casual searches anymore. You'd have to know exactly what to look for, and exactly when to look." I sat down at my kitchen table with the wine still untouched in front of me. "Her name," I said. "Start there." "Betty," Priya said quietly. "Betty Ashford. She was his wife for three months." I felt something in my chest go very still, the way a room goes still right before a storm actually arrives, when the air pressure changes before anything visible happens. "She died of an aggressive illness," Priya continued, her vo