When Her Cheating Husband’s Luck Ran Out Chapter 06

When Her Cheating Husband’s Luck Ran Out Chapter 06 Page Three

My phone buzzed against the desk, Marcus had sent a message. [Files are in your inbox. Start on page three.]

opened my email and pulled up the attachment. Page three was a medical record.

Sadie Larkin, admitted to Rosemont Psychiatric five years ago. Diagnosis, moderate anxiety with delusional features. Discharged after two months of inpatient treatment.]

scrolled down. Page four was a transcript of a recorded call.

The timestamp put it seven years back, Adrian and Sadie.

Sadie had spoken first. “Is she really out of her mind? You’re sure?”

Adrian had answered her. “The doctor said six weeks along, bad shape, probably won’t hold.”

‘Then that solves it. Saves us the trouble.” Sadie again. “One thing though. That baby she’s carrying, is it yours?”

‘I don’t know.”

‘You slept with her for three years and you don’t know?”

‘That system of hers is not natural,” Adrian said. “I had a psychic look into it. Three years, and every time I went to touch her Something happened to me. I’d trip. I’d go dizzy out of nowhere. I could never get near her.”

‘So the baby isn’t yours.”

‘I don’t know. There were plenty of men in Ashmoor.”

‘Enough. Leave it to me.”

put the phone down and tapped my fingers once against the desk. So that was it.

My father had never been certain the baby was his.

That was why he stood in front of the cameras and called it one bad decision.

He had laid the groundwork long before any of it broke.

By the time the photos ran, the whole country already believed my mother had cheated and was carrying another man’s child.

She never once told me what those three years in Ashmoor were actually like.

She said they sold her to the Ivory and that strangers did whatever they wanted with her.

She said it the way you would describe weather in another country, calm and far away, as though it had happened to somebody else.

It took me years to understand that she had not been putting on a brave face. She had genuinely stopped caring.

Whatever part of her belonged to this world had already left it.

The Arclight contract was Kestrel’s lifeline.

Kestrel had built itself on next-generation batteries, and Adrian had spent three years poaching the core engineering team from every rival he could reach. The year before, they had moved into solid-state cells, and a working prototype would have tripted the company’s value.

Arclight’s founder had shared a dorm room with my mother in college.

Nolan brought the technical proposal in while I was going through Kestrel’s public filings for the year.

Their research spending had dropped every year running, and their marketing budget had climbed to fill the gap. It was the oldest tell in the industry.

When a technology company started pouring money into advertising and starving its labs, it meant the pipeline had already run dry.

Nolan leaned in the doorway. “Ms. Pierce, Marianne Doyle over at Arclight wants to take you to dinner.”

“When?”

‘Tomorrow night.”

‘Book it.”

got to the restaurant on time the next evening.

Marianne was a few years younger than my mother, in a deep green sheath dress with her hair up, and she carried herself well.

The first thing she said to me was, “You look just like her.”

‘Thank you, Ms. Doyle.”

‘Don’t call me that. Marianne is fine.” She poured me a cup of coffee. “Your mom had the bed across from mine in our dorm, Every night she’d tell me about her daughter, how bright she was, how sweet.”

My hand stopped with the cup halfway up.

“She missed you even back then.” Marianne let out a breath. “She told me she regretted it. She said she never should have stayed in this world for a man, and that you were the one person she could never make it up to.”

I didn’t trust myself to answer.

“So whatever you’re planning, I’m behind you.” Marianne looked straight at me and she meant it. “I read your technical proposal It’s miles past anything Kestrel has, and you’re cheaper. I’d have to be out of my mind not to sign with you.”

“Thank you, Marianne.”

“There’s one condition, though.”

“Name it.”