I Own Twenty Percent of My Ex Husband’s Company のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 51 - チャプター 60

Serena woke early on the morning of the summit, before her alarm even had a chance to ring. A mix of nervousness and hopeful energy pulled her out of sleep long before she needed to get up.She lay in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling, thinking through the day ahead the way she’d been running through it in her mind for the past week. Her hair appointment at noon. Her dress, still hanging carefully on the back of her closet door, where she’d been able to see it every night since she bought it. It had become a quiet, private source of comfort through months that felt more and more uncertain.Then, the summit itself starting at seven, she had already pictured the ballroom a dozen times in her head, elegant and full of exactly the kind of people whose opinions mattered most in this particular world.She made herself coffee and sat at her kitchen table, and for a while, the doubts that had been quietly accumulating for months, the overheard conversation in the study, the whispers abo

The ballroom glittered the way these events always did, chandeliers casting warm light across a sea of men in black-tie suits and women in evening gowns, the low sound of hundreds of conversations blending into a single steady murmur that filled the enormous space.Kael walked in beside Serena, her hand light on his arm, the small velvet box sitting heavy in his jacket pocket where he had placed it that afternoon without ever fully deciding whether he was going to use it tonight. He had told himself, while getting dressed, that he would know when the right moment came. He believed that once he was standing in the room, surrounded by the people expecting the announcement, everything would become clearer. He also thought about the family legacy and the reassurance his mother had been so insistent on providing.The clarity he had hoped for never came. He moved through the crowd, greeting board members and people from the industry, while Serena stood beside him looking radiant in her emer

She felt the question settle calmly inside her. There was no panic or sudden tightness in her chest, unlike how she might have reacted months earlier if someone had asked her the same question in public. She had time to prepare for a moment like this, whether she realized it or not. Months of difficult encounters and carefully keeping her distance had slowly prepared her for this kind of question, until it finally came in a room filled with people whose opinions truly mattered to her business.“We used to be married,” she said calmly and clearly, without any extra emotion in her voice.He heard her words from about twenty feet away. They carried easily through the silence that had settled over that part of the ballroom after the chairman’s announcement. The simple honesty in her voice made his chest tighten. She had said it plainly, without emotion or hesitation, as if their marriage were simply a fact from the past.We used to be married.She didn’t call him her ex-husband, she didn’

The crowd around Elara thinned gradually as the evening wore on, the initial excitement of the announcement settling into the steadier rhythm of a summit proceeding with its regular program; dinner service began, conversations drifted to other topics as the industry’s attention moved, naturally, on to whatever came next.Marcus found her near one of the quieter corners of the ballroom sometime after the main course had been cleared, two glasses of champagne in his hands, offering her one with a soft, genuine smile.“You handled that beautifully,” he said. “The announcement, the questions afterward. I watched you the whole time, there wasn't a single crack.”“I had some help staying steady,” Elara said, taking the glass. She finally let herself feel the full weight of the evening settle into something she could actually enjoy rather than simply manage. “You, mostly. This partnership wouldn’t exist without you believing in my idea enough to back it properly.”“Your business idea was alw

The headlines were waiting for Kael before he’d even finished his first cup of coffee, Marissa forwarded him a summary email at seven in the morning with a subject line that read: You’ll want to see this before the board call.He scrolled through them on his phone at his kitchen counter and his stomach tightened with each new piece of headline.Vale Capital’s Meteoric Rise Continues: Twenty-Two Percent Stake in Sterling Group Signals Shifting Power in Legacy Manufacturing Sector.Elara Vale: The Founder Everyone’s Watching, and Why Sterling Group Should Be Worried.Sterling Group’s Quiet Vulnerability: How a Small Firm Built Real Leverage in Under a Year.Every article told the same story. They praised Vale Capital’s rapid rise, with headlines that were almost breathless in their admiration. Sterling Group, meanwhile, was framed as a cautious, established company that had been caught off guard by a competitor it had failed to take seriously soon enough.One article briefly mentioned t