Lahat ng Kabanata ng THE BILLIONAIRE’S EX-WIFE BECAME HIS GREATEST RIVAL: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

I opened the message.**Don’t wait for me. Something came up at the office.**Seven words. Seven words for our fifth anniversary, and somehow they felt shorter than that, as if he’d trimmed away anything that might have cost him another few seconds to type. I read it again, then a third time, waiting for it to soften, the way a bruise sometimes looks less alarming the longer you stare at it. It didn’t soften. I thought about calling him — my thumb actually hovered over the icon — but I knew what I’d hear if I did: the particular clipped patience in his voice that meant he was in a room full of people and couldn’t fully attend to me even while pretending to.I typed instead: *Is everything okay?*The reply came a minute later. **There’s a serious issue with a client account. I have to handle it tonight. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.**And here was the strange, humbling thing about myself that I noticed in that moment — my very first instinct wasn’t anger. It was concern. For him.

I told myself to leave it alone.It wasn’t my presentation. It wasn’t my company. I had just spent half the morning deciding that I was done automatically making myself useful to Adrian whenever something needed solving, and here I was, still standing in the doorway of his study, unable to walk away from a stack of papers that weren’t mine to touch.I went back in anyway.I picked up the presentation and studied the page again, the one that had caught my eye — a growth projection for the Kessler account, the same account that had kept him from our anniversary dinner. At first glance, nothing looked wrong. The formatting was clean, the language was confident, the kind of polished certainty that made boardrooms nod along without asking too many questions. But when I compared the projected revenue against the underlying growth assumptions, something didn’t sit right. It wasn’t a mathematical error, not the kind a proofreader would catch. It was buried deeper than that — an assumption qui

The gift looked smaller in my hands than it had when I bought it.It had been sitting on my nightstand for two days now, wrapped in the same paper I’d chosen so carefully weeks ago, and every time I passed it I felt some small, private argument start up in my chest about whether it still belonged in this house at all. I thought about the pen I’d found for Adrian — a heavy, understated fountain pen, the kind he’d once admired in a shop window during a trip we’d taken years ago, before either of us had let the marriage grow this quiet. I’d had it engraved on the barrel, small enough that he’d have to look closely to find it: our wedding date, and beneath it, three words I still wasn’t sure I’d chosen correctly. I remembered exactly how excited I’d been finding it. That excitement felt, now, like something that belonged to a slightly different woman than the one holding the box.The morning after the Kessler meeting had been ordinary in a way that somehow ached more than a real argument

“My mother wants everyone there tonight,” Adrian said, already reaching for his cufflinks.I looked up from the mirror, some old instinct sharpening in me before I could name it. Clara Blackwood didn’t summon family dinners the way other people did — a casual Sunday, an easy excuse to gather. When Clara called for everyone to be somewhere, it meant something had shifted, some current running beneath the surface of the family that the rest of us weren’t fully aware of yet.“Any particular reason?” I asked.“Something about the company, I think. And family things.” He shrugged into his jacket, the gesture so practiced it barely registered as a gesture at all. “You know how these dinners go.”I did know, mostly, and I let the vagueness pass without pressing him further, though I noticed — the way I’d started noticing things lately — that he hadn’t really explained anything at all. He’d simply assumed I would understand, the way he assumed most things about me without checking whether the

I woke already knowing the day was different, before I’d even opened my eyes fully. *It’s been a long time.* Adrian’s voice from the night before was still sitting somewhere in the back of my mind, quiet and low, the tone he’d never once used with me in five years of marriage.I went through my morning the way I’d been teaching myself to — coffee, a few pages in my notebook, a small private plan taking shape that had nothing to do with anyone but me. But I noticed Adrian across the kitchen, checking his phone more than usual, glancing at the clock with a kind of awareness I wasn’t sure he understood himself. Not excitement, exactly. Something more like a man bracing for weather he couldn’t quite predict.His phone buzzed, and he read the message with an attention he rarely gave anything before nine in the morning.“She’s here?” I asked.He looked up, and there was no pretending he didn’t know exactly who I meant. “Yes.” A beat. “There’s a business meeting this afternoon. A reception,