The Billionaire Ex-Wife's Return (Cynthia and Ethan) novel Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Ethan’s POV

I was staring at the acquisition contract when Margaret burst through my office door.

I was already irritated. I’d been staring at these margin percentages for hours, supposedly reviewing numbers that would determine the future of Walker Industries, but my mind hadn’t been on the contract most of those hours.

It had been on that woman in the black Bentley, I just couldn’t get over the fact that it could be Cynthia.

Could Cynthia have had a twin no one knew about?

“Sir, I… you need to see this,” Margret said as she burst into my office, her voice trembling. “This was trending about an hour ago. The posts are being taken down, but…”

She looked like she’d seen the apocalypse unfold in real time. Her eyes were too wide in shock and her face drained of color.

In five years of working for me, I’d never seen her this rattled.

“What is that, Margret?” I asked, already losing my patience at her panic over a mere trending incident on the net.

She set her tablet on my desk and I picked it up to watch the grainy video, shot from someone’s phone in what looked like a

lecture hall.

At first, all I could see was a woman standing at a podium looking elegant, composed, commanding, speaking to an audience of about two hundred people, I couldn’t capture her face clearly because of the angle of the video but she had a very familiar physic.

Then a man stood up, accusing her. His voice carried even through the phone speaker, loud and vicious and certain.

“Fraud,” he was saying all manner of negative things concerning the woman before he pulled up some photos in the projector.

Those photos are photos I recognised and would never forget. I remembered those pictures vividly, Cynthia hated to look at pictures from middle school, she claimed there were traumatizing and I didn’t really understand.

Cynthia?

The angle of the video got clearer as the panic attack overtook her as she stood completely alone and defenseless while someone methodically dismantled her credibility in front of hundreds of witnesses.

“What the hell?”

“Sir?” Margaret’s voice was small and uncertain. “Isn’t that… isn’t that your dead wife? Am I imagining things?”

Dead wife. The words felt surreal and impossible, but the woman on the screen was unmistakably Cynthia.

“Pull everything,” I said, my voice rough. “Social media, news outlets, university statements. Everything you can find. Now.”

Margaret moved quickly. While she worked, I watched the video again, I burned the moment her panic tully took hold and was baffled when security move in to grab the culprit. Then, the awful sight of a man in the background tall, athletic, draping an expensive coat around her like she was something precious. Like he was protecting her from the world, that was supposed to be my fucking cue! I am her husband! Who is he?

He looked familiar too, and that was when it clicked.

The F1 racer I did research on. Kevin Laurent, whose Bently I’d seen at Ashford Heights with a woman who looked like my dead wife, so that was actually Cynthia?

Within minutes, Margaret had compiled a timeline. The incident was at Missford University and the videos posted were rapidly deleted. The university’s official statement verifying academic credentials and restaurant legitimacy.

#20

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I just couldn’t think straight. Cynthia owned Maison Cynclair, a Michelin three–star restaurant that had become an overnight sensation in Paris three years ago?

I had personally arranged for Walker Industries‘ wine products to be supplied to that restaurant to boost our brand’s visibility, but the order had been rejected and returned. Cynthia Cynclair owned it?

The media didn’t say Cynthia Walker but Cynthia Cynclair. She changed her name? My head felt hot as I tried to make sense of it.

Cynthia was supposed to be dead. The hospital had called three years ago, reporting her diagnosis and that she only had six months to live – and then she disappeared.

I’d spent those three years drowning in guilt and regret, torturing myself with the knowledge that I’d failed her when she needed me most, and now she was alive?

“Sir, are you alright?” Margaret’s voice broke through my thoughts but I ignored her.

The pieces were falling into place with devastating clarity.

Cynthia had always dreamed of Paris. Years ago, when we were still pretending our marriage might work, I’d found her staring at a large framed photograph of the Eiffel Tower she’d hung in our bedroom. She told me about her dream to attend culinary school in Paris, learning from the masters, living in a city where food was treated like art.

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