The MC President's Forsaken Wife (Zara and Knox) novel Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Zara

For a split second, I consider letting it go to voicemail. I think about letting the quiet stretch just a little longer before I step fully into whatever comes next.

But I decide to answer.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is this Zara?” A woman’s voice comes through the speaker, bright and achingly young. This is Claire from the property agency… you inquired about a studio yesterday. The one on Market Street?”

For a second, I can’t speak.

Not because I don’t know what to say, but because something inside me has gone very still, very quiet. As though the universe itself has paused to see what I’ll choose this time.

“Yes,” I say finally, my voice softer than before. “Yes, I did.”

“Well,” she says warmly, “it’s still available, and if you’d like, I can meet you there today. Even

now.”

The word lands somewhere deep. Not tomorrow. Not eventually. Not when someone else decides I’m allowed to move forward.

Now.

I close my eyes briefly, standing there in the warm afternoon light outside the lawyer’s office. The divorce papers are signed behind me, the old version of my life still bleeding out somewhere in the distance like a wound I no longer intend to reopen.

For the first time in years, nobody gets to decide what I do next. Who I become next.

“Yes,” I say again, and this time the word feels different. Stronger. “I’d like that.”

“Perfect. I’ll text you the address.”

I lower the phone slowly, staring out at the city moving around me. I look at all the strangers crossing streets and laughing and carrying groceries and living ordinary little lives that suddenly don’t seem ordinary at all.

They have the life that I want, and want badly.

1/3

Chapter 9

Claim

A tiny apartment. Secondhand furniture. Cheap coffee mugs. Sunlight hitting unpainted

walls.

And it’s my life. Mine.

The thought hits me so hard my throat tightens unexpectedly. Because it isn’t grief this time, or fear, or desperation clawing at my chest.

It’s freedom.

A slow breath leaves me as I walk over to Mayhem, my heels striking the sidewalk with a steadiness that I don’t quite recognize yet… but maybe that’s the point.

Maybe becoming someone new is supposed to feel wrong at first, the way torn skin aches

while it heals.

Maybe rebirth was never meant to be gentle.

Maybe it’s the slow, brutal surrender of everything you once begged life not to take from you.

And for the first time in my twenty-eight years, I stop begging.

I surrender.

I let myself feel every sharp edge of the abject humiliation of having loved someone who never loved me back. Instead of breaking beneath the weight of it, I open myself to it completely. There’s something freeing in finally admitting that suffering has changed me.

That it should have. That surviving it matters.

I welcome the ache now, not because I enjoy it, but because it proves I finally walked away before there was nothing left of me at all.

And maybe feeling a bit lost isn’t the tragedy I once thought it was.

Maybe it’s simply what happens when a woman burns her old life to the ground, and then stands there in the smoking ashes.

She just stands there-strong and silent and still-for long enough to realize that she no longer wants to be the person who built that life in the first place.

Never, ever again.

***

The building is pretty easy to miss.

2/3

Chapter 9

Clair

If I hadn’t been actively looking for it, I’d have walked straight past without realizing that this narrow, slightly weathered doorway tucked between a shuttered tailor’s shop and a café that smells faintly of burnt sugar is where I’m meant to begin again.

There’s no sign, no polished entrance. Just a worn brass number beside the door and a buzzer that looks like it has been pressed too many times by too many hands.

“Zara?”

I turn. Claire is walking toward me, phone in one hand, keys in the other, long blonde hair blowing in the breeze.

Her expression is bright but not intrusive, the kind of warmth that belongs to someone who deals in small beginnings, and knows better than to make them feel like anything else.

“Hi,” I say. “Thanks for doing this so fast.”

“No problem,” she replies, unlocking the door. “It’s just up

here.”

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