Início / Reborn, I Married My Ex-Fiancé’s Older Brother / Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

Todos os capítulos de Reborn, I Married My Ex-Fiancé’s Older Brother: Capítulo 1 - Capítulo 10

12 Capítulos

Chapter 1

When the wildfire reached the treatment center, the door to my room was still locked.The sky outside had turned dark red. Ash swirled against the glass. The fire alarm had been blaring for more than ten minutes, but no one came down the hall to open my door.I was seven months pregnant, and there was still a needle mark on my wrist from the sedative. My stomach kept tightening. The baby was still so small. It couldn't come now, not like this."Is anyone there?"I pounded on the door. My voice was already hoarse.My call to the nurses' station finally went through, and I heard the doctors on duty arguing at the other end."The helicopter can only take one more person.""Mr. Vale just gave the order. Ms. Cole goes first.""What about Ms. Reed?"After a crackle of static, I heard Lucas."Keep her calm. She's emotionally unstable right now. She can't leave the ward without authorization."Holding the phone, I forgot how to breathe.Just two hours earlier, I'd begged him. I told him I wasn

Chapter 2

The next morning, Helen Morris took over the Reed Trust's legal affairs.She was in her 40s. She spoke slowly, but she reviewed documents incredibly fast. Less than half an hour into our meeting, she pulled another attachment from behind the voting proxy."It renews automatically after the wedding." She slid the page toward me. "Unless the proxy holder resigns or a court finds him unfit, your authorization will renew every year."I stared at the page numbers Lucas's legal team had added to the document.In my last life, no one had explained this clause to me, and I'd never asked."Can I still get out of it?""You didn't sign, so of course you can." Helen looked up at me. "What's really strange is this."She opened another set of financial records. Two weeks earlier, the Vale Foundation had paid two hundred forty thousand dollars to a safety equipment supplier, yet the approval note read, "Temporary advance for the Reed wedding reception."My name was in the box for the person who'd giv

Chapter 3

An hour before the charity gala, the supplier sent its demand for payment to three media outlets.The ballroom lights had barely come on when reporters crowded around the photo backdrop."Ms. Reed, did the foundation use donations to pay for your private wedding?""Did you use your seat on the board to pressure the finance team into covering it up?"Serena hurried out of the crowd, pale, clutching her phone.This gala was the foundation's most important fundraiser of the year. The ballroom was filled with wildfire survivors and their families, longtime donors, and representatives from the company's partner banks. When my father was alive, he always reserved the front row for the people the foundation served. He wanted everyone to remember who those donations were meant to reach.But now the people the gala was meant to spotlight had all been pushed into the corners by the cameras.The old me would have already apologized to the reporters, then promised Lucas this wouldn't hurt the comp

Chapter 4

The emergency board meeting took place two days later.Reporters packed the area beyond the conference room's glass walls. The company had decided to livestream the meeting for shareholders, so neither side could later claim the process hadn't been transparent.Lucas sat across from me. His father, Theodore Vale, sat on his left. Both wore dark suits and looked as confident as they always did at meetings they were certain would go their way.Adrian sat alone at the far end of the long table.After the secretary read the agenda, Lucas spoke first."The dispute over the foundation's email is under investigation. I oppose rushing to replace management over a private conflict."He put heavy emphasis on the word "private."One of the directors close to him immediately asked, "Then why do you think Ms. Reed suddenly withdrew her voting proxy?"Lucas looked at me."She's bothered that Serena and I work together. And she's been getting some inappropriate advice.""Inappropriate advice from who

Chapter 5

"Adrian Vale."The instant Theodore said the name, the stock chart on the side screen shot up.The secretary continued reading the resolution. For 60 days, Adrian would serve as interim CEO and report directly to the board's audit committee. Lucas would be removed from consideration for CEO and barred from accessing any documents related to the Reed Trust.Lucas shoved his chair back hard."Dad, you're really going to let someone the company kicked out seven years ago take over?"Theodore kept his hand pressed against the ballot."I didn't put him in charge," he said. "The vote did."Adrian didn't look at Lucas.He accepted the paperwork granting him interim authority. His first order was to preserve every record held by finance, legal, IT, and security, suspend automatic email deletion, and back up the server logs off-site.He didn't celebrate or fire his brother's team. He simply made sure that the records that would otherwise disappear during routine cleanups were preserved first.T

Chapter 6

The Calistoga mountain resort stood at the edge of the tree line.When we arrived, a north wind bent all the dry grass in the same direction. Instead of heading to the conference room first, Adrian had the staff run a full evacuation drill as if the resort were already open.As soon as the first bus left the parking lot, I could tell the head count was wrong."What about the guests in the wheelchair-accessible rooms?"The safety manager flipped through his list. "There's a separate plan for them.""Which vehicle?"He couldn't answer.We made them run the drill again. On the second attempt, the staff found the wheelchair-lift van, only to discover that its keys were locked in the administrative office. On the third, the Spanish-speaking contract gardeners didn't understand the announcement and kept working at the bottom of the slope. It took a fourth run for every team to account for everyone within the required time.The report listed every problem the drills uncovered. It even noted t

Chapter 7

A photo of Adrian and me outside the ranger station made entertainment headlines the next day.In the photo, Adrian and I were walking side by side toward the same car. The image had been cropped to leave out the safety manager and Nathan, along with the reports each of us was carrying.The headline was pure innuendo: Fiancée Falls for Her Fiancé's Older Brother: Secrets Behind the Vale Succession Battle.Three of the foundation's sponsors put their partnerships on hold. Serena posted on Instagram that she had never meant to hurt anyone and only hoped that "secret relationships would never hold a charity hostage."She never actually said anyone had cheated. But put that line about secret relationships next to the photo, and it was hard for anyone to think otherwise.After Adrian read the PR briefing, he put a draft statement in front of me. It announced that he would step down as the public face of the project."I can step back for now," he said. "The external team will continue the au

Chapter 8

Lucas didn't wait long.Early the next morning, he appeared live on a financial news show, holding the engagement ring I'd left at the board meeting."The wedding hasn't been canceled. It's only been postponed." He faced the camera, looking haggard but composed. "Evelyn has been under too much pressure lately. Someone is taking advantage of her fear of wildfires and pushing her into rash decisions."The host asked whether that someone was Adrian.Lucas didn't answer. All he said was, "For her sake, I'm willing to drop out of the race for CEO. I want her to come home, so we can work things out the way we used to."The interview was quickly cut into short clips.Some commenters said a man willing to give up an entire company had proven his love. Others urged me not to throw away all our years together out of spite.Every time he talked like this in my last life, I went back to him. Jewelry, a trip, or a line about how I was the only one who deserved to stand beside him was enough to make

Chapter 9

The hearing was set for 48 hours later.Helen found me an independent doctor. I completed the evaluation and turned over my recent meeting notes, work emails, and the original video of the public Q&A. Each record showed that I knew exactly what I was doing. Even so, I barely slept during the two nights before the hearing.Every time I closed my eyes, I thought of the door at the treatment center. Back then, it had started the same way: with a document. After that, everything I said had been dismissed as the ravings of a patient.In the courtroom, Lucas sat at the petitioner's table. He didn't look at me.His lawyer submitted Dr. Bennett's statement first. Then he listed everything I'd done: breaking off the engagement without warning, revoking the proxy, choosing Adrian, and warning about the wildfire risk. He claimed these decisions formed an ongoing "pattern of paranoia."The judge asked Lucas, "You're asking for a temporary conservatorship of her estate. Why is so much of this filin

Chapter 10

The first weekend after the hearing, there were no meetings and no reporters.Adrian asked if I wanted to go on a date. I didn't say yes right away."I need to be sure about something," I said."What?""I want to know whether I'd still want to see you this much if we weren't going through the books and no one was chasing us with cameras."He nodded. "Okay. Take your time."So we spent two days apart.At the winery, I took inventory of the vintage wines my father had left behind and fixed a window that never quite closed. On Saturday afternoon, I picked up my phone and put it down three times. By that night, I realized I wanted to tell Adrian that my father had hidden his best bottle in a plain cardboard box because he always said people who really knew wine didn't need a gold label.I wanted to hear how Adrian would tease my father about it. That small detail was all I could think about that night.On Sunday, I texted Adrian.Are you free tomorrow night? I'd like to take you to dinner.

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