My Husband’s Ex Lived in My House for Three Years Chapter 03
In the end, he managed only two words. “Let’s go.”
He turned and walked with Hannah toward that black Maybach.
From a distance, the two of them looked far more like a married couple than we ever had.
After Hannah brought Duffy back to Claude Villa, she didn’t do a single thing the way I’d told her to.
She set Duffy on the couch and pulled a new can of cat food from the cabinet.
It was something she’d grabbed off a shelf at an import grocery, the label printed in foreign language, and it looked expensive.
She opened it and set it in front of Duffy.
He sniffed once and turned his head away.
“You won’t eat?” Hannah frowned and reached for another can, tuna this time.
Duffy still didn’t move.
“What is it you actually want to eat?”
There was already an edge of impatience in her voice.
Duffy lay on the couch with his blue eyes half closed and didn’t so much as flick his tail.
Lucas saw this and came over. “Did you soak the kibble?”
“I did. He won’t eat it.”
A thread of self-pity ran through her voice.
“Lucas, I tried every one of Caroline’s methods, and none of them worked.”
Lucas was quiet for a moment. He crouched by the couch and stroked Duffy’s back, and the cat’s spine pressed up against his fingers one vertebra at a time through the fur.
Duffy hadn’t been like this before.
He remembered how Caroline always used to crouch beside the bowl when Duffy ate, pressing each piece of kibble into warm water until it softened just right, never too hard and never too mushy.
When the cat finished, she would rub his belly and say Duffy had a bad stomach and needed a rub afterward to feel comfortable.
Back then, Lucas would be in the study working through paperwork, and now and then he’d pass the living room and catch the scene, and he’d never once thought it worth noticing.
Looking back now, every one of those images felt unbearably warm.
“Maybe he’s just getting old,” Lucas murmured.
I took over Langley Group’s overseas division soon after, and I made it official fast.
At my very first board meeting, I cut two suppliers who’d been taking kickbacks.
My father sat in the corner of the conference room, saying not a word in my defense the whole time.
Afterward, he offered only one line. “You’re exactly like your mother was when she was young.”
I found my footing in the business world little by little, but news of Lucas and Hannah kept reaching me every few days.
Someone caught a photo of Lucas taking Hannah to a private dinner.
It tore through the socialite group chats, and someone tagged me with a popcorn emoji.
Right after that, someone else said Hannah had already been living at Claude Villa for over half a month and had gone through two housekeepers.
Lucas went to Claude Villa every night and told everyone he was only there to see the cat.
But nobody would believe that.
People in our circle had already started calling Hannah “Lucas’s side piece.”
I paid none of it any attention. I deleted every group chat that was picking the story apart, put my phone on silent, and went back to my meeting with the foreign client.
When the meeting ended, I opened WhatsApp and found a message Lucas had sent three days earlier, buried far down under all the group noise.
Lucas: [When are you coming home?]
I stared at that line for a long time. Home. That place had never once been my home.