All Chapters of MY HUSBAND OWNS HALF THE CITY: Chapter 161
- Chapter 170
228 chapters
Chapter 161
The argument about the roux had now reached its eighth Sunday.It had settled into something almost ceremonial, like a weekly mass where the scripture never changed but the sermons somehow still surprised everyone. Benjamin arrived with fresh annotations this time—margin notes in blue ink, a new source he swore was definitive. Chloe greeted the pages with the small, precise smile she reserved for intellectual combat and immediately began cross-referencing them against her phone. The rest of the table placed quiet bets with their eyes on how many minutes it would take before the conversation looped back to the original disagreement.Kai didn’t bet. He already knew the answer.He was in the kitchen earlier than usual, finishing the actual roux for the gumbo that would feed them all. Medium heat. Stir when it needed it. Leave it when it didn’t. He checked it by nose more than by eye, the way he always had. The smell shifted from toasted to nutty to something deeper, almost coffee-like, r
Chapter 162
The argument did not end when the plates were cleared.It simply changed rooms.The dining table was now a field of abandoned forks, crumpled napkins, and half-empty glasses, but the conversation had migrated into the kitchen like it always did, as if the house itself refused to let it die. Someone had opened the windows. The late air drifted in, carrying the faint sound of distant traffic and something floral from the garden that Lila insisted was jasmine but Benjamin kept trying to classify more precisely.Kai stood at the stove again, not cooking this time, just letting the gumbo rest. The pot sat heavy and quiet, surface shimmering slightly as if it still remembered the heat it had come from. He stirred it once out of habit more than need, then set the spoon down.Behind him, Benjamin had taken over a corner of the counter.It looked less like cooking and more like an investigation.There were measuring spoons lined up with unnecessary precision. A notepad. A pen. And a small bowl
Chapter 163
The house did not stay empty for long.It never did.Even after the last plate had been carried away and the living room swallowed the others whole, there was still the soft persistence of life in the walls, like the building refused to fully forget what had just happened inside it.Kai stayed by the kitchen counter, not moving at first. The pot was still there, sealed now, heavy with everything it had already become. Steam no longer rose, but the memory of it lingered in the air like warmth that had nowhere else to go.Lila remained beside him.Not speaking. Not rushing to fill the silence.Just there.From the hallway, faint laughter drifted back, James saying something that made Chloe respond with a tired but honest sound of amusement. Benjamin’s voice followed after, still carrying that same careful intensity, as if the argument had simply relocated itself into memory and refused to dissolve.Kai exhaled slowly.“You didn’t have to stay,” he said.Lila tilted her head slightly aga
Chapter 164
The house finished settling around midnight.Kai heard it the way he always did, not as silence exactly, but as the particular quality of quiet that only arrived after everyone had gone, after the last door had closed and the last set of headlights had swept across the ceiling and dissolved.He stood at the sink, running water that was already too cold, rinsing a glass that did not need rinsing.Behind him, Lila moved through the kitchen with Marcus still against her shoulder, though the baby had long since given up any pretense of wakefulness. His weight had become the trusting, boneless kind. The kind that said he had made his decision about the world and found it acceptable.“You should sit down,” Lila said.“I’m fine.”“You’ve been standing since seven.”Kai set the glass in the rack without turning around. “So have you.”She did not answer that immediately.He heard her shift Marcus to her other shoulder, heard the small sound the baby made in response, a soft syllable that meant
Chapter 165
Monday arrived the way difficult weeks always did, without announcement, already moving.Kai was in the office before seven. Not because it was required, but because the building was different at that hour, quieter in a way that let him think without the thinking being observed. The glass walls that felt transparent all day long became something closer to private before the floors filled up.He had the Morrison file open on his desk.Not the official version. The one Okonkwo had assembled across three weeks of careful, unremarkable requests, each document pulled from a different angle so that no single thread would draw attention before they were ready.Kai read it the way he read everything important, slowly and more than once, looking not for what it said but for what it assumed.Morrison had been careful.That was the first thing that struck him every time he returned to it. Not careless careful, the kind that left clean edges and no loose ends. Institutional careful. The kind buil
Chapter 166
Okonkwo’s office was on the fourteenth floor of a building that had no name on the outside, only a street number, which was the kind of detail that either meant nothing or meant everything depending on who was asking.Kai arrived at ten past ten.The receptionist did not make him wait.Okonkwo was standing when Kai came in, not at his desk but at the long table by the window where he spread things out when he was working through something that required physical space. Documents were arranged across it in a pattern that looked like disorder and wasn’t.“Close the door,” Okonkwo said without turning.Kai closed it.Okonkwo was a precise man in his sixties, with the kind of stillness that came from having spent decades in rooms where panic was expensive. He had represented the Hartley family for eleven years. He had never once told Kai what he wanted to hear when what he needed to hear was different.That was why Kai trusted him.“Sit,” Okonkwo said.Kai pulled out a chair at the table a
Chapter 167
Lila was in a meeting when he got back.Kai could see her through the glass partition of the second conference room, seated at the head of the table with three people he recognized from the architecture team and one he didn’t. She was talking, not loudly, but with the particular quality of attention she brought to things that required precision, her hands still on the table, her eyes moving between faces in the measured way that meant she was tracking not just what was being said but who was saying it and why.She saw him in the corridor.Nothing changed in her expression.But her eyes held his for a half second longer than they needed to, and in that half second she understood that something had shifted.He nodded once.She returned to the meeting without pause.Kai went to his office and closed the door.He stood at the window for a moment, not thinking exactly, more allowing the shape of the morning to settle into something he could work with. The city below had reached its midday
Chapter 168
Tuesday came in grey and stayed that way.Lila left the house before Kai, which was unusual enough that Marcus noticed, or did whatever the infant equivalent of noticing was, a small sound of protest when her warmth moved away from him and did not immediately return.Kai picked him up.Marcus considered this substitution for a moment, then accepted it with the philosophical resignation of someone who had learned early that the world made its own decisions.“She’ll be back tonight,” Kai said.Marcus looked at him with the flat, ancient attention of a baby who had no opinion on timelines.Kai carried him to the window.The garden was still there, damp from overnight rain, the grass holding its color in the grey light with a kind of stubborn brightness. A bird moved across the far fence, unhurried, as if it had been told the morning was not urgent and had chosen to believe this.Kai stood there longer than he needed to.It was not avoidance. It was more the particular stillness he allowe
Chapter 169
Okonkwo arrived at seven-forty Wednesday morning with a leather portfolio and the expression of a man who had slept three hours and considered them sufficient.Kai let him in himself. The building was still quiet at that hour, the overnight security finishing their last round, the cleaning crew already gone, the day staff not yet arrived. The particular emptiness of an office before it became an office again.They sat in Kai’s office with the door closed and the summary spread across the desk between them.Twelve pages.Every source cited. Every connection annotated. Every date in sequence.Kai read it once through without speaking. Okonkwo sat across from him and drank the coffee Kai had made and did not rush him.When Kai finished he turned back to page four and read one section again.“The registered agent filed on the same day,” he said.“Within hours,” Okonkwo said. “The property transfer and the consultancy registration. Same firm, same day, different desks. Whether that was del
Chapter 170
Vance arrived at two fifty-eight.Kai knew this not because he was watching but because James texted him from the lobby, a single word, and Kai read it and set his phone face down and looked at Lila across the conference table and said nothing.Lila straightened one page of the notepad in front of her and said nothing back.James came in two minutes later and took the chair to Kai’s left without being directed to it, the chair that put him slightly behind Kai’s sightline, present but not prominent, the position of someone who was there to observe and whose observation would not be immediately obvious.The clock on the wall read three-oh-one.It was visible from the chair at the far end of the table.Lila had chosen the room.Vance came in at three-oh-three and the man with him was not legal counsel.Kai recognized him after a half second. Vincent Hara, who had been on the periphery of two board conversations over the past eighteen months without ever being at the table. Consultant, te