Semua Bab My ex husband lost me to his rival : Bab 41 - Bab 50

(POV: Blake)I didn't move from his room for a long time after. Just sat there while the house filled up around me with people who had protocols for painful moments like this.The lawyers and the authorities. The Sterling Global PR team who materialized within the hour the way they always did — quietly carrying their folders and their carefully worded press statements and their low voices that made crisis management sound like condolence.I answered every question. I signed everything they put in front of me. I shook hands I didn't feel.And then they were gone and the house went quiet. I was sitting in the chair across from his desk looking at the empty chair by the window.He sat there every morning by the window. Just with his coffee looking out at the city like he was counting something only he could see. I spent years thinking it was arrogance. That particular stillness of a man who worked hard for the things he owned and he knew it.Sterling Tower was visible from here. My name

(POV: Blake)I didn't move from his desk until everyone else had gone to bed.The envelope sat open in front of me. One page and my father's handwriting — precise and unhurried even at the end, the specific script of a man who had never in his life written anything in a way he wants to pass his information to others.I picked it up and read ---“Blake My Son”No preamble, You never liked preamble neither did I.“I am writing this because there are things a man cannot say standing up. I have spent my entire life standing up and I have discovered, rather late, that it costs something. I am writing this so the cost doesn't pass entirely to you because I knew a day like this will come.”“I made decisions. Across the years decisions about Sterling Global, about the family, about you that I believed were right. I understand now that believing a decision is right and it simply being yours are not the same thing. The distance between those two things is the distance between a legacy and a l

(OLIVIA POV)“He's gone come when you can”I brought out my phone and read madam Chen’s message she sent me two nights ago, twice again and closed my work laptop.I sat completely still for a moment.I thought about his voice two nights ago. Low and careful, stripped of everything I had spent six years hearing it carry. The way he said goodnight quietly, like a man putting something down he had been holding too long.I thought about the fact that I had called him back. That we had spoken twice in the last days of his life and both times felt more honest than anything that had happened across six years of dinners and board meetings and careful Sterling functions,as if he knew he was dying.I got up and wore my coat,carried my bag and walked towards the office door.---Crest Estate felt different when I arrived.Not really emptier but something else. Like a building that had been holding its breath for a very long time and had finally let it go.Madam Chen opened the door when she he

(OLIVIA POV)My mother's face was the first thing in my mind when I opened my eyes.Her white hair and the book in her lap. The way she said my name when she saw me standing in the garden doorway like she had been rehearsing it quietly for six years and it still came out perfectly.I lay still for a moment.Then I got up Showered,dressed up and made tea. Sat at the kitchen table with my phone and my notebook and started making calls.---My lawyer answered on the second ring."I want to go full offense," I said. "Everything we have, mail and every board communication. Every crisis resolution and Singapore correspondence. Formally submitted not just for the custody case, For the record."She was quiet for a moment. "Olivia this is significant. Once we submit formally it becomes part of the public proceedings.""I know.""Are you certain?"I thought about my mother's hand gripping mine across a garden table. About six years of visiting days she spent waiting for a daughter who never

(LUCIANO POV)The doors were already open when I arrived.Lorenzo sat at the head of the table arranging papers without looking up. He knew I was there. He looked up and nodded once.I nodded back and took my seat.Two board members were already in their seats — Hargreaves checking his notes, Park scrolling something on his phone without urgency. Neither of them looked up. The room had the particular stillness of a meeting everyone understood the outcome of before the chairman called it to order.Blake arrived three minutes late.He came through the door without the certainty I had watched him carry into every room since our childhood. No performance or arrangement of authority across his face. Just a man who had finished an argument with himself somewhere between the car and the door.He looked at me across the table and held his gaze.He looked at Lorenzo the way a man looked at something he had finally named correctly.Lorenzo's hand moved once against his folder,then stilled immed