All Chapters of The Wife He Couldn't Erase : Chapter 41 - Chapter 47

Lyara: The light outside the windows had gone thin. Not night yet, but the kind of dusk that made the office feel smaller, like the walls were leaning in. The building was quiet now. Most of the staff had left an hour ago. Emma was gone. The cleaning crew wouldn’t come until midnight. Only Heather stayed, hunched over her laptop at the side desk, glasses slipping down her nose as she scrolled through rows of numbers. I stayed too. Not because I wanted to. Because Heather was more than a secretary. She’d been the one holding my hand. The one who taught me how to smile. She stayed because she hated loose ends more than she hated overtime. We were trying to read through the correction files. Page after page of numbers, clauses, footnotes that could ruin us if one comma was in the wrong place. It was too much for a few hours. My eyes burned. But it was better than walking away and pretending it’d fix itself by morning. The door opened and Ethan walked in. His tie was loose, sleeves ro

Lyara:My phone hadn't stopped vibrating since dawn. Ashworth Heights' stock had climbed again overnight, and every business channel was calling it the Lyara Effect. My press conference from yesterday dominated the headlines, while fashion blogs were already speculating about my first jewelry collection. Every headline, every notification, every expectation settled on my shoulders as I crossed the lobby. I kept my stride measured and my expression calm.“President!” Emma burst through the revolving door before I even reached the reception desk. Her heels clicked frantically against the floor, and her tablet was clutched to her chest. Her eyes were bright in a way I had never seen before.“You’re trending number one,” she said, and she was already falling into step beside me. “And the comments? You need to hear this one. Listen. ‘I’ve never bought jewelry in my life but if Lyara makes it, I’m putting aside 200 cedis every month.’ Another one says, “She stood up to them and won. I

Ethan:The morning light came through the glass walls of Ashworth Heights like it was apologizing for being too bright.I stood in Lyara’s office with a folder I did not need and a reason I had invented ten minutes ago in the car. The contract signing yesterday had put us on every business channel in Sterling City. Cameras, flashbulbs, analysts calling it the biggest power shift in a decade. I had spent the night reading the coverage and pretending the noise didn’t matter. Heather was the first one to notice me. She looked up from her tablet and immediately folded her arms.“Boss,” she said, with the kind of tone that meant she had already decided what I was doing here. “You’re not here for a meeting.”“I am,” I said, and held up the folder. “A private business discussion. With Lyara.”Emma appeared in the doorway behind her, holding two coffee cups and the expression of someone who had not slept either. She took one look at me, then at the folder, then at Lyara who was sitting at he

Claire:I walked toward Father’s study with my hands full of papers I didn’t really need anymore.The loan papers, stamped and finally marked as settled. The customs release forms for the containers that had been sitting in the port for two months. Proof that somehow, impossibly, the part of my business that had been drowning was now breathing again.I had come to tell him. To ask how. To ask who had paid it, because I knew it wasn’t him. The hallway was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that made the sound of my heels feel like an accusation. Before I reached the door, I heard his voice—low. Not his usual voice, the one that filled rooms and made people sit up straighter. This was smaller. Careful.“...make sure it doesn’t trace back to me,” he was saying. “I don’t care what it costs.”My hand was already raised to knock. I paused. Curiosity pulled at me, but something else did too, something cold that had been sitting in my stomach. I knocked once, waited half a second, and pus