Semua Bab The Return Of The Discarded Billionaire Ex-Wife: Bab 71 - Bab 80

Clara's POVTwelve weeks in I had a scare.It was a Thursday morning. I was at the foundation when it happened. A cramp that was different from the usual low-grade discomfort I had been managing, sharper and more insistent, and then a moment that sent me directly to my phone.Silas was in a meeting and his phone went to the quiet mode he used in board sessions. I called twice and then I called Cassie.She answered immediately. By the time I had finished two sentences she was already moving. "Do not drive yourself," she said. "I am coming. Sit down."She arrived in fourteen minutes. She drove me to the hospital with both hands on the wheel, and her face set in the particular expression of someone who is frightened, and has decided that frightened is not useful right now.Silas arrived at the hospital twenty-two minutes after that. He came through the door of the waiting area with his jacket undone, and his phone still in his hand, and found me sitting with Cassie and the particular

Clara's POVLuke's card arrived on a Wednesday.I recognized the handwriting on the envelope before I opened it. That looping careful script. I sat at the kitchen table and opened it and read it twice.I hope the baby is kind.I pressed the card flat against the table with both hands for a moment. Then I went to find Silas.He read it. He was quiet for a moment.“He is a good boy," he said.“He always was," I said. "He just needed better circumstances to show it in."I put the card on the shelf in the room we had begun to think of quietly as the nursery, though we had not started any preparation yet. The room had a window that faced the garden and a particular quality of afternoon light that I had noticed on the first day and that had made me point at it when Silas asked which room felt right.Luke's card sat on the shelf and the afternoon light hit it and I stood in the doorway of that room, and thought about everything that had found its way to me through the second chance I had b

Nick's POVMy consulting practice got its first significant client in the sixth month.A manufacturing company with three hundred employees in the eastern region that had been in slow decline for two years and whose owner had finally accepted that something needed to change. He had found me through a referral from one of my earlier clients, which meant the work was already doing what good work was supposed to do: generating its own next step.I drove out to the facility, walked the floor, sat with the department heads and the workers and the owner in equal measure and listened before I said anything. That was the practice I had developed. The discipline of listening before advising. It had not come naturally. It had come from two years of uncomfortable self-awareness and a therapist who was not willing to let me skip the hard steps.The owner was a man in his sixties named Barlow who had started the company with his brother forty years ago and had been running it alone since his bro

Clara's POVThere was a journalist.His name was Prentice Cole. He wrote for a publication that sat between legitimate long-form journalism and the kind of piece that built its authority on implication rather than evidence. His reputation was that he was thorough enough to avoid lawsuits and pointed enough to cause damage without technically doing anything legally actionable.He sent a formal inquiry to Rosa at Luther Corporation, which she forwarded to me. He was writing a piece on the Eleanor Moore Foundation. The inquiry was politely framed and asked seven questions. Six of them were standard. The seventh was: "Can you confirm that Clara Luther, formerly Clara Moore, has discussed or claimed the ability to predict future events based on claimed prior knowledge, and that this claimed ability influenced decisions at Luther Corporation?"I read the seventh question three times.Then I called Silas.“Someone has talked to him about the rebirth," I said. Not panicked. Stating a fact.

Clara's POVAt thirty-four weeks the tiredness came back.Different from the first trimester kind. That had been a pulling, draining exhaustion. This was more like weight. A physical heaviness that made the simple act of standing up from a chair requires a moment of preparation. My body was working hard and reminding me of it at every opportunity.I was still going into the office four days a week, which was two fewer than I had been managing two months earlier. Dr. Yuen had taken over the running of the board meetings with the efficiency of someone who had been waiting for the opportunity for entirely professional reasons and had no interest in giving it back permanently.“I will give it back," she told me one morning on the phone.“I know," I said."I am simply keeping it running at the correct temperature."“I appreciate that," I said.“Recover properly," she said. "A woman who rushes her recovery to get back to a table is a woman who becomes less effective for years. I have see