My Husband’s Ex Lived in My House for Three Years Chapter 09
Three months after the divorce, I closed the single biggest deal Langley Group’s overseas division had landed all year, over in Ashcroft.
On the flight home, my assistant handed me a briefing she’d put together from the recent news, and I flipped through a few pages.
Adams had been going through mass layoffs and restructuring lately.
Lucas himself reportedly stayed at the office until all hours, and all the client dinners and drinking had given him a stomach bleed.
His physical last month had come back with early-stage stomach cancer, and he’d already been hospitalized for surgery.
The board had put him on leave to recover, and Keith had come out of retirement to steady the ship.
I wasn’t all that surprised.
He’d never held back on the dinners and the drinking over the years.
I’d warned him plenty of times, and he’d always said his hands were tied.
Now his hands were tied badly enough to land him in a hospital bed, so in a way, he’d gotten exactly what he asked for.
As for Hannah, I reached the last page just as I closed the briefing. It was a small, unremarkable social item with a blurry photo attached.
Hannah stood at the stairwell of a run-down apartment complex, in a wrinkled sweater, a coarse-faced man beside her shouting at her.
The headline read: [High-Society Dream Shattered: Former Socialite Weds Gambler, Suffers Abuse.]
I tossed the briefing back onto my assistant’s tray, slipped on my sleep mask, and leaned into the seat to rest.
The plane cut through the clouds, and sunlight slanted in through the window, settling warm on my arm.
Duffy was buried under the magnolia tree, and next spring it should bloom beautifully.
I bought a new place.
It wasn’t big, three bedrooms and two baths, with a south-facing balcony that caught the sun all day long.
In one corner of the balcony, I’d set a small cat bed.
It stayed empty, but every morning I dropped a single freeze-dried treat into it.
Some habits couldn’t be broken, so I stopped trying to break them.
It was dusk when we landed.
I wheeled my suitcase out of the terminal, and the evening wind rushed at me, carrying that dry, crisp edge that only autumn has.
The trees outside the airport had turned a sheet of gold, and the wind lifted the leaves and sent them drifting across the whole sky.
My phone buzzed. It was a message from my father.
Dad: [Come home for dinner tonight. The king crab I had flown in just arrived.]
I sent back a single [Okay] and tucked the phone into my pocket.
When I opened the car door, the rearview mirror caught my face.
My color was good, my eyes were bright, and the corner of my mouth had curved up on its own.
The car merged into traffic, and the lights of a thousand homes unrolled on either side of the windows.
I turned on the radio, and an old song was playing.
The road ahead was still long, but I wasn’t in any hurry anymore.