All Chapters of REBORN BEFORE THE APOCALYPSE: MY EX-HUSBAND BEGGED TOO LATE: Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

The man I spent ten years protecting was the same man who decided I was expendable when the world ended.I didn’t know that yet, not really, not in the part of me that still stood on a cracked street corner waiting for him like a fool. But some quieter part of me — the part that would survive long after the rest of me stopped believing in anything — already knew. It had known for longer than I wanted to admit.The city around me didn’t look like the city I’d grown up in anymore. The streetlights had been dead for six days. The building across from me, the one that used to house a bakery Adrian and I visited on Sunday mornings, had a shattered storefront and a spray-painted warning on its remaining wall: NO WATER. NO FOOD. DON’T ASK. Somewhere behind me, a generator coughed and died, and someone swore in the dark.I stood there anyway, arms wrapped around myself, watching the mouth of the street for a man who wasn’t coming.*He wouldn’t leave me here. Not really. Not after everything.*

I stood at the door with my keys still in my hand and my heart still slamming from the last message, and I almost went straight there. That was the old instinct — move fast, fix it, don’t let the fear catch up with me. But I made myself stop and actually think about what I’d just been told.*He isn’t the only one watching you.*If someone already knew I’d found the warehouse, then walking straight into it, alone, unprepared, might be exactly what they wanted. In my first life, my mistake hadn’t only been trusting Adrian. It had been trusting information I never bothered to verify — his version of events, my family’s version of Margaret, a decade of stories I’d simply accepted because questioning them felt disloyal.I wasn’t doing that again.I set the keys down and went back to my laptop instead.Public records first. Property ownership. Company filings. It took less than twenty minutes to confirm the address existed — a warehouse complex twenty minutes outside the city, legally regis

Reyes’s code kept running through my mind like a phrase in a language I’d only half learned. I went back to the documents and searched with new purpose this time, and it didn’t take long to find it — the same string of letters and numbers, attached to a property record buried three pages into a file I’d almost skipped.The location was farther out than the warehouse, registered through a different company entirely, one I hadn’t seen anywhere else in Margaret’s paperwork. But when I traced the ownership chain, it led back to Ashwell Logistics all the same, just through another layer.Another layer. That detail caught in my chest and stayed there.This wasn’t carelessness. Margaret hadn’t simply forgotten to consolidate her holdings under one name. She had deliberately built distance between herself and the things she owned, one shell company at a time, like a woman constructing a maze she alone knew how to walk.*Why would you need that many walls between yourself and your own property

I stared at the words until they stopped looking like letters and started looking like a door.**PROJECT ASH — E.C.**My whole life, I’d been told Margaret left almost nothing behind. A small, failing company. Sentimental value only. Now I was looking at a hidden account, funded in my own name, and my first thought wasn’t relief.It was *why did you hide this from me* — followed almost immediately by something colder.*Who else knows this exists?*I didn’t touch the money. That felt important, sitting there with my cursor hovering over a transfer button I had no intention of pressing. The version of me who’d died on that street corner would have already been calculating how much of it Adrian’s business needed. This version of me understood that information mattered more than access, at least until I knew exactly what I was looking at.I took screenshots of everything. Downloaded the full transaction history before anything could change or disappear the way Margaret’s records seemed to