Semua Bab Rejected by the Billionaire, Returned With His Child: Bab 31 - Bab 40

VIVIENNEThe apartment is perfect.That is the thing I keep coming back to, sitting at the window of the Tribeca apartment I moved into six weeks ago with the decisive energy of a woman making a statement. It is perfect in the way that everything I choose is perfect — curated, intentional, every detail considered. The right address. The right square footage. The right view of the Hudson that catches the light in the morning in a way that photographs beautifully. I spent three days selecting it, paid three months upfront in cash because cash is its own kind of message, and furnished it in the ten days after with the focused efficiency of someone who needed very badly to be busy.The plan had been simple. Leave first. Leave on my terms, with my chin up, with the story controlled. Jaxon would have a week — two at the most — of the cold, echoing penthouse before he remembered what it felt like to have someone in it. He would call. He always called. In three years of living together he nev

JENNAAdaeze calls at seven fifty-three in the morning, which means it is one fifty-three in London and she has not slept, which means she already knows."We got it," she says, before I can speak. Her voice has the particular compressed quality of someone containing a very large feeling inside a very small sentence.I am sitting on the edge of my hotel bed in the gray early light, coffee in hand, Zion still asleep in the next room. I have been awake for an hour, which I will not tell Adaeze because she will read too much into it and she will be correct."Serena Walsh called you directly?" I ask."Forty minutes ago. Full contract. Phase one through three. They want the team on-site starting Monday." A pause. "Jenna. This is Vale Industries.""I know what it is," I say."Do you want to talk about—""No," I say. "I want to talk about the phase one deliverables and whether Marcus can get the consumer research framework ready by Wednesday."A silence. The kind that means Adaeze has registe

VIVIENNEI tell myself I am here on legitimate business.This is not entirely untrue. I do have a contact at Vale Industries — a woman named Dana in the events department who has owed me a favor since a charity gala three years ago when I quietly ensured her name was removed from a guest list that would have been professionally embarrassing for her. Dana has been grateful in the way that people are grateful when they understand that the debt has no expiration date. I texted her on Monday. I asked if she could arrange a visitor pass for Wednesday afternoon, something about discussing a potential partnership with a lifestyle brand I am loosely affiliated with. Dana arranged it within the hour.So yes. Legitimate business.I dress carefully. Not the way I would dress for Jaxon — that calculation is different, warmer, designed to remind him of specific things. This is different. I choose the ivory wrap dress because it is elegant without trying too hard, the camel coat because it photogra

VIVIENNEI make it to the elevator before anything shows on my face.That is the thing I am most proud of — not the composure in the hallway, which cost me more than I will ever admit, but the twenty steps from where I left her to the elevator bank, walked at a pace that was not hurried, with my shoulders level and my chin where it belongs and nothing on my face that could be read by anyone watching. And people are always watching in buildings like this. I learned that from Lila too. In rooms full of powerful people, the moment you show something is the moment you lose it.The elevator doors close.I am alone.I look at my reflection in the polished steel doors and I do not recognize the expression on my face. It is not anger — anger I know, anger is clean and useful and I have spent my whole life knowing exactly what to do with it. This is something else. Something that sits lower. Something that feels uncomfortably like the specific shame of a woman who arrived somewhere prepared to

JENNAThe first thing I notice is the coffee.Not that there is coffee — there is always coffee in the Vale Industries break room on the twenty-eighth floor, a machine that produces something adequately drinkable that my team has been supplementing with beans from a place two blocks away because Priya has standards she refuses to compromise even on a client site. What I notice, on Wednesday morning of our second week, is that there is a cup already on my workstation when I arrive. Not from the break room machine. From the good place two blocks away. My order — oat milk, one sugar, the medium roast — in a cup with my name written on it in handwriting that is not Priya's and not Marcus's and is, I realize after a moment of staring at it, very familiar.I look around the floor. Serena is at her desk across the room, already on a call. The rest of the Vale team are at their stations. No one is watching me discover the coffee. No one is waiting for a reaction.I sit down. I pick up the cup