All Chapters of The Accident Was No Mistake: My CEO Husband Wants Me Back : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

VALERIE“Tomorrow,” I repeated, like the word might change shape if I said it out loud.Miles stood in my kitchen with the paper bag still on the counter. Gerald remained under the sink, unmoved by the shift in atmosphere. I envied him.“Tomorrow morning,” Miles said. “Early flight. I only found out a few hours ago, or I would’ve told you sooner.”“And you’re gone for…?”“Honestly? I don’t know yet.” He exhaled, the admission clearly costing him something. “Could be a year, maybe more, if it’s what I actually think it is.”Practical shock first. That was what arrived. Just the sudden mental rearrangement of calendars, evening plans, the soft assumption that he would keep appearing in my doorway with food and patience and dumb work stories. Tomorrow. A year. Maybe more.“Okay,” I said, because my mouth needed something to do. “Start from the beginning. What happened?”He did.The Boston client’s production environment had been unstable for weeks, but remote patching had stopped being e

ROMANI unbuttoned my coat and flung it on the bed, breathing hard.Air.I needed air.The bedroom was too still after the drive back into the city. I stood in the middle of the rug and tried to take a full breath, then another, and neither one went where it was supposed toMy lungs caught halfway, like the room had less oxygen than the street outside.I exhaled through my mouth and heard it come out wrong. Not now.My hands flexed once at my sides. I knew this shape. Hated this shape. The tightness starting under the sternum, then climbing into the throat. The sense that my pulse had moved into places it did not belong… wrists, temples, the base of my tongue. I braced my palms on my knees and stared at the floorboards until the grain of the wood threatened to slideIn.Out.In.The breath broke again on the way down.Adrian’s voice was still in my head.Alone. The word repeated with the same rhythm as my pulse. Alone in the company. Alone in the marriage I had already lost. Alone

VALERIE If there’s one quality about myself I’ve never particularly admired, it’s how acutely aware I am, in the moment, of every possible consequence an action might set in motion… and how that awareness has never once actually stopped me from doing the exact thing I knew was a bad idea anyway. Something in my wiring apparently decided a long time ago that foresight was purely decorative, a feature installed without any corresponding ability to act on it.“This is a terrible idea,” I mumbled, mostly to myself, as I left my apartment, pulled my coat tighter against the chill, and climbed into the back of a cab without giving myself the chance to properly argue myself out of it first.“This is a genuinely terrible idea,” I repeated, quieter now, as the cab wound its way through traffic toward Midtown.By the time I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Ashford Industries building, craning my neck up at all that glass and steel stretching toward a sky it seemed determined to com

ROMANThe drive cut across the city in a blur of lights and impatience. I did not remember half the turns. I remembered only the possibility that she had come to me on the one day I least looked like a man worth coming toward, and that she had left believing the worst available version of the facts. What if she had actually seen me and Iris together and believed the wrong thing…again??I parked outside her building, took the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator, my chest tight in a way that had nothing to do with this morning’s panic and everything to do with the particular, specific fear of having ruined something before I even understood what it had been.I knocked.It took a moment. Then the door opened, and she was standing there.Something in my chest simply stopped.She looked tired, hair pulled back loosely, wearing an old sweater. There was no makeup on her face. Just her, caught mid-afternoon in her own apartment, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t immediately

VALERIEI wasn’t calm about it. Not even close.I sat in my apartment for another twenty minutes after Miles’s call ended, replaying the kiss, replaying my own lie, replaying the particular hollow sound of “everything is fine” leaving my mouth like it might eventually start sounding true if I just said it enough times, and somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark I gave up trying to talk myself down and reached for my phone instead.I needed Zoey. She’d know what to actually do with this mess.I boarded a cab, gave the driver her address, and spent the entire ride spiraling quietly against the window…running through every version of the conversation I was about to have, every possible way she might react, every scenario where she told me, gently or not so gently, that I’d ruined something good over a moment of weakness I should have seen coming from a mile away.The cab pulled up outside her building, and I was reaching for the door handle when I noticed her.Zoey, standing near the e