《His Billion-Dollar Regret: The Forgotten Wife Returns》全部章節：第 181 章 - 第 190 章

[POV: Yessica](Location: Edinburgh)Three news vans were parked outside before noon.Yessica counted them from the upstairs window — cameras assembled, journalists positioned, all of them aimed at one front door."Mama." Claire pressed against her side. "Why are those people out there?""They're doing their jobs, sweetheart." The lie came out smooth. "We're going to have a nice day inside, okay?"Claire accepted that. Yessica didn't.Downstairs, Lewis was pacing. She could track him by sound — living room to kitchen, kitchen to hallway, back again. The kind of silence that meant he was thinking somewhere she couldn't reach.She opened her laptop and immediately regretted it.#SterlingFraud was trending across every platform. Business publications that had praised Lewis for years were now dismantling him paragraph by paragraph. Twitter was worse — thousands calling him a thief, a criminal, a disgrace. Think pieces analyzing his "pattern of deception" were already live: the secret daug

[POV: Yessica] (Location: Edinburgh)The amended motion sat on Eleanor's table like a live wire.Termination of parental rights upon conviction.Yessica read it twice. Lewis hadn't moved beside her, but she felt the shift in him — the way a person goes quiet when something crosses a line they didn't know existed until it was already crossed."She can file that," Eleanor said, keeping her voice low and even. "But a judge won't grant it without a conviction. Right now, our focus is today's hearing. We deal with what's in front of us."Judge Morrison entered. Everyone stood.Regina sat across the aisle with her lawyer, James Whitmore — expensive suit, reputation for aggressive tactics. She looked nervous. She kept glancing at Lewis, then away.Whitmore presented his case first: printed news articles, social media screenshots, stock price charts, and minutes from this morning's board meeting, all arranged into a neat portrait of a household in collapse."Mr. Sterling's household is unde

[POV: Regina] (Location: Edinburgh, Inverleith Park)Regina wasn't supposed to be at Inverleith Park on Saturday afternoon.Ethan was with Lewis this weekend. Court-ordered, scheduled to the hour. She knew that. Which was exactly why she hadn't thought twice about walking through the park on the way to dinner with David.Edinburgh was full of parks. The odds of running into them were—She saw them before they saw her.Lewis and Yessica on a bench near the climbing frames. Ethan running in circles with Rose, who was barely keeping up on her toddler legs but shrieking with delight anyway.Regina's first instinct was to turn around. Walk the other direction before anyone looked up.She didn't.Ethan fell. It wasn't dramatic — just a tumble in the woodchips, the kind that happened fifty times in any playground visit. He sat there for half a second, palm scraped, processing whether or not this required tears.Regina tensed.Lewis was already there. Kneeling in the woodchips, not rushing,

[POV: Yessica] (Location: Edinburgh — Sterling Industries)Sienna's question hung in the air like a dare."Tell me. What exactly do you think you know?"She was smiling. Leaning back in her chair like she'd already won. Like this was theater staged for her entertainment and Lewis was the one who'd walked into the trap.Yessica kept her hands still in her lap. The recording pen was on the table between them. Lewis's phone was in his jacket pocket, audio running. Every second of this was being captured.Lewis didn't rush. He pulled a chair out, sat down across from Sienna, and let the silence stretch until her smile started to look like effort."I know about the backdoor malware installed on my old laptop before it was donated to charity," he said. "I know it gave you remote access to my company systems for eight months. I know about the Singapore shell company registered to your holdings that was used to route the transfers."Sienna's expression didn't crack. But something shifted be

[POV: Lewis] (Location: Edinburgh)The Monday morning hearing took eleven minutes.Eleanor presented Catherine's prison motion to the bench at 9:02 AM. Judge Morrison read it once, set it down, and looked at Lewis's lawyer with an expression that said she already knew her ruling before anyone spoke."This motion has no legal standing," Eleanor said simply. "A criminal conviction does not extinguish parental rights. Ms. Sterling is attempting to leverage her own fraud conviction as a weapon in family court — the very conviction obtained through her deliberate attempt to manufacture the fraudulent circumstances she's now citing as grounds for termination."Judge Morrison didn't need to deliberate."Motion denied." The gavel came down at 9:13 AM. "Ms. Sterling's criminal conviction, filed from her current place of incarceration, is not sufficient grounds to modify this court's custody arrangement. Mr. Sterling's parental rights remain fully intact. This motion is dismissed with prejudi