All Chapters of Three Nights To Ruin My Husband : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Adrian's hand slipped from mine."Stay here," he said, low, already stepping toward the aisle that had opened between us and the stage."Adrian…""I'll be fine. Stay close to the bar. If anything happens, leave without me."I didn't answer. I didn't have time to before he was moving, the room's attention swinging with him.I stayed where I was, my champagne glass forgotten in my hand, watching him climb the three shallow steps and take his place a careful distance from Whitfield, close enough to be polite, far enough to make clear he hadn't chosen this."Thank you for joining me," Whitfield said, warm in a way that didn't reach his eyes even from this distance. "I know this wasn't planned.""No," Adrian said. "It wasn't.""Your father was a remarkable man. I don't think this city ever properly understood what he built, or what was taken from him." Whitfield let that sit a moment, his gaze moving briefly out into the crowd … toward me, I realized, though I couldn't be certain. "I only

I put the phone away before Adrian could see the screen.I don't know why I did it. Some instinct, maybe, that whatever this new text meant, it wasn't his to carry on top of everything else tonight had already asked of him. Or maybe I just wasn't ready to say Mia's name out loud again so soon after watching Ash hold her hand like a trophy."You went somewhere," Adrian said, quiet, as we moved back into the main room."I'm fine.""You don't have to be. Not with me."I almost told him then. The words were right there, ready. I swallowed them instead, because the room was still watching, and because some part of me wanted to sit with the question alone a little longer before I handed it to anyone else.Dinner passed in a blur of small talk I barely tracked, my fork moving through a plate I didn't taste, my face arranged into the particular pleasant blankness I'd perfected over six years of dinners exactly like this one. Someone gave a toast to Whitfield's foundation, warm and rehearsed,

"No," Adrian said. "Ash isn't talking to me. I need you to hear that clearly, because I can see exactly where your mind just went and it's the wrong direction.""Then who?""I can't tell you that yet.""You can't, or you won't.""Both. Neither. I don't have a clean way to separate the two right now." He rubbed a hand over his face, the first genuinely tired gesture I'd seen from him all night. "It's not Ash. It's someone who has access to things Ash said, at some point, to someone else. That's as far as I can take you tonight.""That's not an answer, Adrian. That's a shape with no edges.""I know how it sounds.""You keep saying that. You know how things sound. It doesn't change the fact that you never actually tell me anything once you've said it."Something flashed across his face, frustration this time, aimed as much at himself as at me. "You're right. I do that. I've been doing it since the night I broke into your kitchen, and I told myself every single time that I had a good reas

I didn't ask her name.I typed out the question three times … *what's she called, does she still see him, is she the reason you approached me in the first place* … and deleted all three, because some tired, self-protective part of me understood I didn't have room tonight for one more piece of information I couldn't do anything about yet.*Thank you for telling me,* I sent instead.*I know it doesn't fix anything.**It doesn't. But it's more than you've given me before, so I'll take it.*I set the phone down and made myself focus on something with an actual next step attached to it. The mediation. Six days. My lawyer would need financial records, statements, anything that showed the shape of what Ash and I actually shared, and I hadn't looked closely at any of it since the night I'd found those first unexplained transfers, sitting on my parents' porch with my sister beside me.I pulled up the joint account portal, scrolling back further than I had before, further than panic had let me

I didn't answer the text.I read it four times, weighing it against everything else arriving in my phone that night, and decided, finally, that whoever it was could wait until I'd actually seen what Adrian sent. If there was something in his files worth warning me away from, I'd rather find it myself than take a stranger's word for where to look.Adrian's email landed at nine, exactly an hour after he'd promised, no message in the body, just an attachment labeled *Complete File … E.C.*I opened it at my father's desk, and didn't stop reading for three hours.It was more than I'd braced for. Financial records going back years, correspondence between Ash and people I'd never heard him mention, internal memos from his company that painted a picture of a man who'd been drowning quietly for far longer than the last fourteen months alone. There were photographs I didn't recognize, a timeline stretching back to before our wedding, annotations in Adrian's own handwriting that read less like a