All Chapters of The Accident Was No Mistake: My CEO Husband Wants Me Back : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

ROMANValerie sat to my right at the long table, spine straight, hands folded with a composure that would have fooled anyone who hadn’t spent three years learning the difference between Valerie at ease and Valerie performing ease. I knew the difference. I’d built a career on reading rooms, on catching the half-second hesitation before someone said yes to a deal they didn’t actually want, and I was reading her the exact same way now, unable to stop myself.She looked beautiful. That word felt insufficient the longer I sat with it, the way most simple words did whenever I tried to apply them to Valerie specifically. The dress caught the low candlelight every time she shifted, the deep blue of it making her look like she’d been poured into the room rather than seated in it, and her eyes. God, her eyes… still did the thing they’d always done to me, one hazel, one blue, both of them entirely too observant for their own good. She’d changed since I’d last seen her across a table like this.

ROMANI should have stopped at the kiss.Or at the way she said my name when she came. Instead I had asked her to stay, like one balcony and one ruined year could be fixed with a single sentence, and now she was staring at me like I’d just made everything more complicated.Which, apparently, I just did.Valerie straightened her gown and forced her face back to the neutral Valerie I’d gotten used to for a month now…the cold, strange Valerie.“I can’t. I’m leaving.” She said it looking at me with a straight face, and made to leave, but my words stopped her.“Leaving? Are you going to pretend what happened right now didn’t happen?”“That was a mistake,” she blurted.“A mistake,” I repeated. “Right. Because you always come apart like that for men you don’t want. Because that kiss at the table was strategy, and this was nothing, and the way you said my name just now meant absolutely nothing either.”Her shoulders tensed.I should have stopped there. I didn’t.“You’ve spent weeks acting lik

VALERIEPASTI was staring at the past-due notice for so long the numbers had started to blur together, the careful, formal language of my mother care home’s billing office doing nothing to soften the plain fact that I didn’t have what they were asking for. Not this month. Not without dipping into the small amount I’d set aside for the textbook I needed for tomorrow’s class, the one I’d been planning to buy on my way back to the dorm, the one I’d already resigned myself to doing without now.I tucked the notice under my own textbook on the library table, when I heard the familiar scrape of a chair being pulled out across from me.“You’re late,” I said, without looking up. “I almost gave up on you.”“I’m never late,” Roman said, dropping into the seat with his usual unbothered ease. “I’m exactly on time for a version of punctuality that only I understand.”It was our standing joke by now… three weeks into whatever this was, this strange, easy friendship that had started with a library

ROMANThe email came in just after ten, flagged with the kind of routine subject line that usually meant nothing… Q3 Subsidiary Reconciliation: Flagged Items for ReviewThe sort of thing finance sent up the chain a dozen times a quarter, most of it clerical noise that Daniel or someone on his team handled without ever troubling my desk with it.This one landed on my desk anyway, which meant someone further down the chain had decided it was worth my actual attention.I opened the attached report and scanned through it expecting the usual minor discrepancies… a rounding error, a late invoice, something easily explained in thirty seconds by whoever had flagged it. Instead I found myself slowing down somewhere around the third page, rereading a line that didn’t immediately make sense.A payment, routed through one of our smaller holding subsidiaries, to a vendor I didn’t recognize, categorized under a restructuring initiative I had no clear memory of approving. The amount itself wasn’t l

VALERIEBusiness was slow.Not the pleasant kind of slow where you get a chance to wipe the counters properly and still feel useful. The empty kind. By late morning I had served maybe six people total…two regulars with their usual orders, a woman who spent five minutes deciding on a muffin and then left without buying one, and a delivery guy who only wanted water. After that, the café went quiet enough that I could hear the refrigerator humming in the back.I told myself to enjoy it. Slow days were rare. I could restock. Clean the pastry case. Finally look at the inventory list I kept postponing. Instead I ended up behind the counter with a book open to the same page for twenty minutes, then switched to a game on my phone I barely cared about.Eventually, with nothing else left to occupy myself, I did the thing I almost never did anymore… I opened my social media apps and actually started scrolling.Social media wasn’t really my thing these days. I’d never been particularly good at it