Marry Ex's Billionaire Uncle After Divorce (Aurora and Jasper) novel Chapter 275

Chapter 240: Stealing the Show

(Aurora’s POV)

A short pause. “Come to the estate for dinner. I’ll be there in an hour.”

I considered arguing. Then I thought about Eleanor’s cooking and decided it wasn’t worth the fight.

“Fine.”

Eleanor met me at the door with a warm smile and an immediate scan of the space behind me.

“Where’s Phineas?”

“He’s coming. He had to deal with something.” I followed her inside, already feeling the awkwardness of arriving without him. “We didn’t argue, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

She looked relieved but still curious. “You came separately?”

“Team-building ended and I just – left first. It’s nothing.”

William looked up from his armchair across the room. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, then at the empty doorway, and made a sound that communicated a complete opinion without using a single word.

Phineas arrived forty minutes later. He walked in, and both his parents looked at him with the synchronized focus of a firing squad.

William didn’t wait. “Everett family doesn’t hide its own. Whatever she is to you, she doesn’t need to be sneaked around like something you’re ashamed of.”

Phineas didn’t flinch. “It was her idea. Both of ours, actually.”

William’s eyes moved to me.

I jumped in. “It was. If people at work found out I was married to him, every result I produce gets chalked up to nepotism. I’d rather earn it first.”

William sat with that for a moment. His expression didn’t exactly soften, but the sharpness in it redirected – away from me, back toward Phineas, with a look that said he found the whole situation mildly embarrassing regardless of the reasoning.

Phineas sat down, reached for the bread basket, and said nothing further.

Back at work, the next two weeks disappeared into the project. I submitted the final data package

and the analysis report on a Thursday afternoon, and Harrison read through it while I sat across from his desk trying not to watch his face.

He set it down. “This is clean work.”

Char

“Thank you.”

Stealing the Sh

+25 Porus

“I mean it. The methodology section alone-” He shook his head. “I want you presenting this at the product launch. End of the month.”

I stared at him. “I’ve been here four months.”

“I know.”

“There are people on the team who’ve been here for years.”

“And none of them built this from the ground up the way you did.” He leaned back. “You’re the right person for the stage. That’s the end of the discussion.”

I said yes. Then I went back to my desk and immediately started panicking quietly.

The content wasn’t the problem. I knew the material cold. I’d been living inside it for months. What I couldn’t control was the moment the lights came up and I looked out at a room full of people and my brain simply stopped working. That was the part I couldn’t practice away by myself.

Phineas came back from his trip on a Tuesday. I was in the bathroom running through the presentation for what was probably the fifteenth time that day, script in hand, speaking to the mirror with the focused desperation of someone trying to brute-force their way past a mental

block.

I heard him come in. I kept going.

A minute later, he appeared in the doorway.

I finished the paragraph I was on, then turned. “How long were you standing there?”

“Long enough.” He pushed off the doorframe and held out his hand. “Give me that.”

“I’m practicing.”

“I can see that. Give it to me.”

I handed over the script. He looked at it for a moment, then set it on the counter.

“Starting tonight,” he said, “you practice in front of me. Every day until the launch.”

“That’s not-”

“You’re not nervous about the content. You’re nervous about the audience.” He looked at me steadily. “So practice with an audience. On the day, I’ll be in the front row, center. You look at me. Everyone else is furniture.”

It was such a simple idea that I felt slightly embarrassed for not thinking of it myself.

“Okay,” I said.

TH

O

Chapter 240 Stailing the Show

He was not a generous audience.

+25 Points

Every evening for the next week, he sat in the armchair in the living room with his arms crossed and his face completely neutral – not cold exactly, but not warm either. Just blank. The kind of face you’d get from a stranger in a boardroom who had already decided they weren’t impressed.

The first two nights, I stumbled twice each. He waited both times, said nothing, and just looked at me until I started again from the beginning.

“You don’t have to look so severe,” I said on the third night.

“The CEO of Meridian Health is going to be in that room. He looks exactly like this.”

I had no response to that. I started again from the beginning.

By the end of the week, I stopped noticing his expression. I found the fixed point – his eyes, specifically – and I talked to that point. Everything else fell away.

The morning of the launch, I woke up at six and lay in bed running the opening paragraph in my head until Phineas made me get up and eat breakfast.

The auditorium was full by the time I went backstage. I could hear the low hum of it through the curtain – hundreds of people, cameras, the particular quality of silence that happens right before

something begins.

The lights came up. I walked out.

***

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