All Chapters of Three Nights To Ruin My Husband : Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

The last time I had been in Adrian's study, I'd been going through his drawers.I thought about that as I sat down at the long table across from him, a laptop open between us, a pot of coffee going cold at my elbow. The drawer I'd opened that night was still there, a few feet to his left. It stayed closed, and neither of us looked at it."Read it again," Adrian said.I read it again. His half sat at the top of the screen, spare and precise, every sentence built like a wall.*I have never directed, funded, or participated in any campaign against Mr. Carter or his company. If his investors have lost confidence, I would suggest the cause lies in his books, not in my conduct. I invite him to submit those books to an independent audit, and I will gladly publish the result of mine alongside his.*"It's good," I said."But?""It's cold.""It's meant to be.""It reads like a man who wants to be feared." I scrolled up, then down. "That's fine for you. He'll expect it. He'll know exactly how to

The doorbell rang in the middle of the afternoon.I assumed it was another reporter. They had thinned out since the morning, but a few stragglers still lingered at the end of the street, and I had learned to treat the bell the way you'd treat a wasp, with patience and a long look through the window first.It wasn't a reporter.He was standing on the step with his back half-turned to the door, looking down the street. The coat was perfectly cut. The hair was perfectly styled. He had the posture of a man who had never in his life waited to be let in. And yet, in the angle of his shoulders, in the way his gaze moved along the parked cars one after another, I saw something I had never seen in him in six years of marriage.He was counting who might be watching.I stood in the hall with my hand on the lock for a long moment. Then I opened the door, and kept my other hand on the frame, and did not step back."Elena."His voice was warm. It had always been warm. It was the first thing I'd eve

Mia chose the place, and it told me everything about how frightened she was.A small park on the far edge of the city, half a bench's width from a pond gone gray with the cold. No café, no glass front, no table where anyone could settle behind a newspaper and watch. A single path, a handful of bare trees, and a bench from which you could see anyone approaching from any direction.She was already there when I arrived.I almost didn't recognize her. The blonde hair was tied back under a scarf, and she wore large sunglasses despite the overcast sky, and her coat was too plain for the woman I remembered from the gala. She sat very straight, with both hands pressed between her knees, and she didn't turn her head when I came up the path. She just watched the water."You came," she said."You asked me to.""I wasn't sure you would."I sat. A little distance between us, the way you do with something that might startle. For a long moment neither of us spoke. A single bird moved on the pond, ci

I came down in the morning expecting an empty couch.Part of me had half-convinced myself the night before had been a dream, a woman in a thin coat, a diner with too much light, a promise to find someone a blanket. But the kitchen was warm, and the kettle was already ticking, and Mia was standing at the counter in yesterday's clothes with her hair pinned up, buttering toast as though she'd done it here a hundred times.She turned when she heard me on the stairs. Her face was washed and bare, and I saw her brace."I hope that's all right," she said. "I didn't want to go through your things. I just found the bread.""It's fine.""I made enough for two."I looked at the plate. Two slices, cut diagonally, set at the table beside two cups. It was such a small, domestic gesture that for a moment I couldn't speak."Thank you," I said finally, and sat.We ate without talking at first. The light outside the window was thin and pale, and the street was quiet, and Mia kept glancing at the door a

Adrian had learned to chop an onion to a reasonable size.I noticed it before I said anything else. It was the first thing I saw when I walked into his kitchen that evening, the board at his elbow, the neat but unmilitary pile of pieces, and I felt a small, ridiculous swell of affection. He glanced up when I came in, and the corner of his mouth moved."Don't," he said."I wasn't going to say anything.""You were going to be proud of me.""I'm still going to be proud of you. I'm just doing it quietly."I had left Mia at the house with the lock on the door and a stack of my old paperbacks, and a promise that I'd be back before it got late. She hadn't asked where I was going. I hadn't offered. It had seemed easier, somehow, to carry what I had to say across the city on my own.We cooked. It went better than the first time, and better than the second. We ate at the long table by the window, with the city spread out below us in a thousand small lights, and for a while we talked about nothi