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Chapter 97 Part 3
Natalie watched her from the couch. She said nothing, because sometimes the kindest thing a friend can do is let the lies finish running out before offering the truth.“He’s moving on,” Chloe whispered. The words left her mouth before she could stop them, and once they were in the air, she couldn’t take them back.“Yes,” Natalie said quietly. “He is.”Chloe pressed her forehead against the glass. The window was cold. The city below was warm and alive and filled with people who didn’t know her name. And somewhere out there, Adrian was having dinner with a woman whose family had more influence than Chloe would accumulate in a lifetime.The jealousy was a living thing. It crawled through her chest and wrapped itself around her ribs and squeezed until her breathing hurt. Not because Adrian was with someone else. Because Adrian was becoming someone else. Someone the world respected. Someone powerful people wanted beside them. Someone who no longer needed anything she had to offer.She had m
Chapter 97 Part 2
Kathy listened. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t redirect the conversation toward business or investigation or the hundred fires burning around their lives. She simply sat across from a man who needed to remember that he was more than the sum of the problems chasing him, and she gave him the space to do it.By the time they left, the tension in his shoulders had eased and the color in his face had returned.“Thank you,” Adrian said in the car.Kathy didn’t respond. She didn’t need to.Across the city, Chloe sat in her living room with her phone in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. Her friend Natalie sat across from her on the couch, scrolling through photographs on her own phone.“Have you seen this?” Natalie turned the screen toward Chloe. A photograph taken at the lakehouse showed Adrian and Kathy standing at the railing together. The image had been posted by one of Serena’s guests, captioned with a string of heart emojis and the words “power couple energy.”Chloe looked at
Chapter 97 Part 1
Kathy watched Adrian’s eyes drift toward the grey haired man for the third time in five minutes. His body was standing beside her at the railing, but the rest of him had left the lakehouse entirely.“Adrian.” Her voice was quiet but sharp. “You’re not here anymore.”He looked at her. The distance in his eyes confirmed what she already knew.“Who is he?” Kathy asked, tilting her head slightly toward the far side of the deck without making the gesture obvious.“I don’t know yet.”“But you recognized him.”“My body recognized him. That’s different.” Adrian placed his glass on the railing. “It could mean nothing.”“Or it could mean something you’re going to spend the next seventy two hours investigating instead of sleeping.” Kathy uncrossed her arms and looked out at the lake. The water had gone grey as the sun moved behind a bank of clouds. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”“Because of him?”“Because of all of it.” Her voice carried the cold honesty she reserved for moments when pretendi
Chapter 96 Part 3
Derek finished his drink and walked toward the opposite end of the deck, his confidence leaking from him with every step that took him farther from the attention he had been performing for.Kathy stood beside Adrian at the railing. Her breathing was still faster than normal, and the tension in her shoulders hadn’t fully released.“I wanted to destroy him,” she said quietly.“I know.”“He talked about my mother.”“I know.” Adrian looked at her. “And the next time someone does that when we’re not at a friend’s lakehouse on a Saturday afternoon, I won’t stop you.”Something crossed Kathy’s face. Not a smile. Something closer to gratitude wrapped in the cold pride that would never let her call it that.The afternoon continued. Derek stayed on the far side of the deck, drinking alone. The other guests gradually returned to their conversations, and the tension dissolved into the warm air and the sound of water lapping against the dock.Adrian was watching the sailboat again when something c
Chapter 96 Part 2
Adrian turned. A man in his late forties stood near the bar with a tumbler of bourbon in one hand and a grin that belonged on a hyena. His name was Derek Shaw. Real estate money. Country club arrogance. The kind of man who measured his own worth by how small he could make the people around him feel.“Derek,” Serena said quickly, her voice tight with the forced politeness of a host watching her event unravel. “Let’s keep things friendly.”“I’m being friendly.” Derek walked toward Adrian with the slow, deliberate steps of a man who wanted everyone watching before he delivered his next line. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. Three years in prison, a company falling apart, an ex wife telling the whole internet what kind of man you really are, and here you stand, sipping water at a lakehouse like none of it ever happened.”Several guests turned. Conversations died. The atmosphere on the deck shifted from relaxed to rigid in the space of three seconds.“Must take a special kind of nerve,” De
Chapter 96 Part 1
Kathy found Adrian in the Skyward lab at eleven on a Friday night. He was sitting behind three screens with a cold cup of coffee beside him and the hollow eyes of a man who had been running on willpower for so long that his body had stopped sending warnings and started sending threats.“When was the last time you slept more than four hours?” Kathy asked from the doorway. Her voice was flat, but the question itself was an act of concern she would never have admitted to.“I don’t remember.”“That’s the answer.” She walked in and closed the laptop nearest to him. “You’re coming out with me tomorrow.”Adrian looked at her. “I have meetings.”“Cancel them.”“I can’t cancel meetings because I’m tired, Kathy.”“You’re not tired. You’re deteriorating.” She crossed her arms and looked at him with the cold, unflinching directness that was as much a part of her as her heartbeat. “My friend Serena is hosting a weekend gathering at her lakehouse. Small group. Good food. No investors, no lawyers, n
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