I Was His Secret Genius, Now I’m His Biggest Regret Chapter 22

I Was His Secret Genius, Now I’m His Biggest Regret Chapter 22

He ignored the investigator’s gaze and stared at the document.

Angel’s Share.

When whiskey aged in oak barrels, the portion that evaporated each year was called the gift offered to the angels.

Clayton’s heart felt as if it were being squeezed by an icy hand. With this name, she was telling him, telling the entire world, that she was the part of Montgomery Distillery that had evaporated—the sacrificed soul.

While he was drowning in Savannah’s charms, while he was sacrificing Ava again and again for so-called family dignity, while he was locking her in that freezing cellar, she had been silently paving her own way out.

A bright path completely beyond his control. A path that belonged only to her.

He gripped the paper until he could barely breathe.

“Address,” he heard himself say, his voice dry.

The investigator immediately gave him an address in Nashville.

Clayton grabbed his car keys and rushed out of the office. He drove straight home, ran upstairs, and pulled his two children, still crying over their mother’s departure, out of bed.

“Get dressed. We’re going to find Mom.”

When the plane landed in Nashville, the Tennessee sky was painfully bright.

Clayton held Beau’s hand in one of his and Daisy’s in the other as they stood at the airport exit. The children had clung to him the entire way, their eyes filled with both hope and fear.

Daisy lifted her head and asked softly, “Dad, will Mom want us?”

Clayton didn’t answer.

He didn’t know the answer either.

The taxi stopped in a creative district converted from old warehouses. Clayton paid the fare and led the children out. Following the building number, he found the distillery with the wooden sign reading “Angel’s Share.”

The factory walls were painted a clean white, and enormous floor-to-ceiling glass windows revealed the entire interior. It lacked the classical weight of the Montgomery estate. Everything here felt modern, simple, and focused.

His steps stopped outside the glass.

He saw Ava.

She wasn’t wearing the socialite suits he had chosen for her. She wore dark blue work clothes, her hair tied back in a simple ponytail. There was a smudge of dust on her cheek as she stood beside a stainless-steel fermentation tank.

She held a tablet and was listening intently to a young man beside her. The man wore black-rimmed glasses and had a sharp, intelligent look. He was pointing at a gauge on the tank and discussing something with her.

Ava listened, nodding now and then. Then she pointed at a curve on the tablet and said something.

The man laughed, showing a row of white teeth, and she laughed, too.

The smile was faint, but it was genuine. Her eyes curved, the corners of her mouth lifted, and in that instant, her whole being seemed to be illuminated.

Clayton stood outside the window, stunned.

He had never seen her like this.

No, perhaps he had.

Before he had been consumed by the family name and his belief in bloodlines, back when they had just married and were squeezed into a small apartment, when she had blended a perfect Old Fashioned for him for the first time.

She had smiled like that then, too.

So that light had never vanished. He had extinguished it with his own hands.