All Chapters of HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

89 Chapters

Chapter Eleven: Learning to Be Hungry

The next morning Sophia called.I was already awake, sitting on the edge of the bed with both hands wrapped around a cup of tea I had made in the small kettle by the window, watching the city outside do what it always did, move, breathe, go on. I had not slept well. The mattress was thin and the radiator had decided at some point in the night that it was done, and I had lain there in the dark for a long time just listening to myself breathe and trying to make the thinking stop long enough to rest.I picked up on the first ring.“I found you something,” Sophia said. No good morning, no how did you sleep. That was Sophia. She went straight to the thing. “Waitressing job. The restaurant is three blocks from you, mid-range, lunch and dinner service. My friend Marcus manages the floor there and he owes me more than he can count. It’s yours if you want it.”I was quiet for a moment.“Sophia.”“Don’t cry.”“I’m not crying.”“Good. Interview is at ten. Wear the blue blouse.”I laughed a littl

Chapter Twelve: The Man Who Didn’t Offer to Save Her

Eight weeks into the job and I had found a rhythm.Not a comfortable one. Rhythm is not always comfortable, sometimes it is just the pattern your body settles into because falling apart on a schedule is not something you can afford. Wake up. Shifts. Bus. Class three nights a week. Sleep four hours if the baby let me, which was becoming less often the further along I got. Start again.The evening it happened, I was leaving my business class late.It had been raining on and off all day, the kind of thin persistent rain that doesn’t commit to anything but makes every surface slightly treacherous anyway. I had my folder tucked under one arm and my bag on my shoulder and I was moving faster than I should have been because I had a bus to catch and the next one was forty minutes away and I could not afford to stand in the rain for forty minutes at six months pregnant.I hit the steps outside the building and my foot went sideways on the wet stone and then everything went at once, my balance,

Chapter Thirteen: The Opportunity She Almost Refused

He nodded, like that confirmed something. Then he said, “I read two paragraphs of something that fell out of your bag that night. Before I could stop myself.” He reached into his jacket and held out a folded paper. My concept paper. The one I had been working on for three weeks, the idea that had been sitting in my head for longer than that, the thing I had written at two in the morning after a double shift when I couldn’t sleep and needed to put it somewhere outside of myself.I took it from him slowly.“I should not have read it,” he said. “But I did. And I have one question.”I waited.“Why haven’t you launched this?”Not what are you planning to do with this. Not this is interesting, have you thought about. Just that. Direct and specific, the way you ask something when you already think you know the answer but want to hear the person say it.I looked at him for a moment.“Because I have no capital,” I said. “No connections. I am six months pregnant, recently divorced, and working

Chapter Fourteen: Before She Could Breathe

Friday came and I was ready.I had been up since five, not from nerves exactly, more from the particular alertness that comes when something important is about to happen and your body refuses to waste it on sleep. I had gone over the concept paper twice. Written out the questions I expected Claire to ask and the answers I wanted to give, not to memorise them, just to hold them in my hands for a while and know they were solid.The terms meeting was at ten.I was there at nine forty-five.Ethan was already in the meeting room when Claire brought me in, jacket on this time, a copy of my concept paper in front of him with notes in the margins, small and precise, the handwriting of someone who had read it properly rather than scanned it. I sat down and looked at those margin notes and something settled in my chest. He had read it. Actually read it.Claire walked me through the document clearly. The timeline, the three conditions under which the micro-investment funds would be released afte

Chapter Fifteen: The Day She Let Someone In

She stayed the whole afternoon, plastic chair and all, leaving only twice, once to get food from the hospital canteen that I ate without tasting and once to take a phone call in the corridor that she came back from looking deliberately unbothered, which meant it had been something she did not want to worry me with. I did not ask. We had an agreement about that, Sophia and I, unspoken but solid, she was allowed to manage what she managed and I was allowed to not notice when she did it.The doctor came back at five and said my pressure had come down enough and the baby’s heartbeat was strong and even and I could go home in the morning as long as I rested properly tonight. I said I would. I meant it more than I had meant anything in weeks.Sophia left at six.After Sophia left the ward went quiet in the particular way hospital wards go quiet in the early evening, the daytime noise settling into something slower, a monitor somewhere, footsteps in the corridor, the distant murmur of a tele

Chapter Sixteen: The Night Noah Arrived

I was discharged the morning after Ethan left. The doctor said rest, proper rest, and I nodded and meant it the way you mean things when you are still warm from sleeping better than you have in months. I went back to the hostel. I ate properly that weekend. I cancelled my Saturday shift, which felt like losing something, but I did it.Then Monday came and the world resumed.Two weeks of mornings that started before six, shifts that ended at two, night classes that ran until nine. Two weeks of prenatal vitamins and check-ups and a baby who moved inside me like he was already restless, already impatient, like he could hear the world out there and had decided it was taking too long.He chose a Thursday.I was on the bus home from class, sitting near the window, coat still buttoned, bag on my lap, twenty-three minutes from the hostel, when it started. Not a nudge this time. Not the vague pulling I had dismissed twice earlier that week. This was different. This came through me in one long,

Chapter Seventeen: Building Something From Nothing

They discharged us four days later. Noah in a blanket Sophia had brought from the hostel, me in the same clothes I had arrived in, both of us stepping out into a February morning that was grey and biting and entirely indifferent to what we had just been through inside those walls.I stood on the pavement outside St. Lennox with my son against my chest and I looked at the street, at the cars and the people moving past without slowing, at the ordinary world that had kept going while everything inside that building had changed completely, and I made myself one promise.Three months. That was what I gave myself before I walked back into a room that mattered.Not to fall apart. Not to sit somewhere quiet and wait for someone to come tell me it was going to be fine. I already knew it was going to be fine. I had decided that in the hospital room at eleven forty-three on a February night with a boy on my chest who already had opinions about the world. Three months to get him strong, get mysel

Chapter Eighteen: The Sunday He Stayed

The mentorship had been running for six weeks. The business plan had grown into a brand deck, the brand deck had grown into supplier contacts, the supplier contacts had grown into something that was beginning to look, just barely, like the outline of a real company. I was sleeping four hours a night and eating whatever required no preparation and I had never felt more alive in my life.And then Noah got sick.Not small sick. Not the kind you manage with half a teaspoon of infant paracetamol and a warm bath and a night of light monitoring. The kind that starts the evening before as a warmth you almost dismiss, a heat under your palm when you lift him from the cot that is slightly, wrongly different from his usual warmth. I pressed my lips to his forehead and held them there a second too long. Took his temperature. Thirty-seven point eight. Borderline. I gave him his medicine, held him until he settled, placed him back in the cot, and sat on the edge of my own bed watching the baby moni

Chapter Nineteen: The Woman She Became in Five Years

Five years did not feel like five years. They felt like one long decision made over and over every morning before the alarm finished sounding.Get up. Feed Noah. Open the laptop. Take the call. Negotiate the clause. Push the margin. Stay in the room when the room wanted to push you out. Choose Noah’s future over your own exhaustion every single time they came into competition, which in those first years was every day without exception, and in the years after that was still most days, just quieter about it.The hostel lasted fourteen months after Noah’s birth.Fourteen months of narrow walls and a window that let in more cold than light, of Noah in his cot taking up half the floor space, of me working at the small table after he slept with my laptop screen turned low so the brightness would not wake him. Fourteen months of managing, carefully and precisely, until managing became something else entirely.It was Ethan who found the apartment. Not as a gift, he was very clear about that,

Chapter 20: The Shares She Bought

The call I made that Thursday night lasted eleven minutes and cost me nothing but time.I had pulled up Sinclair Group’s most recent quarterly filings before I even dialled, reading through the numbers with the specific attention of someone who had spent five years learning exactly what figures were trying to hide when they were arranged a certain way. By the time the line connected I already had four questions prepared. By the time it ended I had answers to all four and a fifth question I had not thought to ask until the third answer made it necessary.I closed the laptop at half past eleven.I did not sleep well. Not from distress. Not from anger. From the particular restlessness of a mind that has been given something genuinely interesting to think about and refuses to set it down.I thought about precision. I thought about the difference between doing something because you are in pain and doing it because you have chosen to, carefully and deliberately, from a position of complete

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