Too Late for Sorry, Mr. Billionaire (Chasing my Wife Back) novel Chapter 144

HAZEL had been thorough. This was not a surprise to anyone who knew her, but the part she played in the way she and Amaka had assembled by Friday morning was something that even Amelia, who had raised her and knew better than anyone what Hazel was capable of when she decided to do something properly, she had not fully anticipated.

The restaurant video had come first. Ryan's contact had delivered it Thursday evening. A full video of Ryan sitting at an expensive table with three different sophisticated women while a waiter returned his card twice. Charles had taken the bait by thinking he could cash the cheques before Amelia and Sandra invalidated it. Someone at a nearby table had recorded the whole ordeal in his phone at that time. It was the kind of clip that needed no caption because a mere looking at it, one would know what was going on with the number of declined cards that had been returned to him. One by one, the faces of the women dropped to something unreadable, but one person had clear disgust on her face.

Hazel had added that one to the video she was making, and then she added something else. The audio from her recording that had Charles' clear and unmistakable voice, laughing about two women whom he was extorting money from. The result was something that played first as comedy and then, about fifteen seconds in, as something considerably darker. You watched him sitting there waiting for a bill he couldn't pay, and you heard his own voice explaining exactly where his money came from. One would put the pieces together that the women found out and withdrew their help, and humiliated him.

"You edited this yourself?" Amelia asked, watching it on Hazel's laptop the morning before it went out.

"Amaka helped with the audio layering," Hazel said. "I did the rest."

Amelia watched it twice.

"This is very good," she said carefully.

"I know," Hazel nodded, her heart swelling with pride of being able to do something for her mother this once.

"I want to be clear," Amelia said, looking at her daughter, "that I didn't ask you to do this."

"I know you didn't," Hazel said. "That's why I did it. You would have been too careful." She paused. "He sat in your house and ate your food and pretended to love your children, Mom. He left Gabriel at school. He stole from your company." She closed the laptop gently. "He needed to feel it."

Amelia looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, "Send it."

It went out Friday morning from two accounts that could not be traced back to either of them. By noon, it had been shared over four hundred times. By three in the afternoon, it had crossed into Charles's professional circles, his social circles, and the particular gossipy middle ground between them where damage of this kind did its most lasting work. By evening, his name was generating notifications on platforms he didn't even actively use, attached to words like *exposed* and *scammer* and, from a few people who had apparently had their own run-ins with him, *finally.*

Amelia watched the numbers climb from her office quietly with a satisfaction she never really expected.

Ryan sat across from her, refreshing his screen periodically with an expression that suggested he was enjoying this more than he was willing to admit professionally.

"Four thousand shares," he said when it was getting late.

"Mm," Amelia said, not looking up from her actual work. She was typing away at her laptop, but she knew what he was talking about.

"This is Sandra and Amelia's hand work," he said bitterly in his empty room the empty room.

The next time his hands went to his phone was when he went to torture himself by watching the video that was spreading across the internet. The more he looked at it and thought about it, the more he arrived at different conclusions. Someone had been listening in on his conversations. Someone had told Amelia and Sandra about his plans which made them begin to suspect him in the first place. There were only two people he could think about at that moment which were Marcus and Julian. But he knew they did not know where he lived to be able to point out where he was for the recording to be made. Did Amelia or Sandra track his location?

There were a lot of things that did not add up, and he wanted to make sure he knew every single one of the people that betrayed him. For his revenge.

He put the phone down with deliberate care, stood up, went to his kitchen, poured a drink, and stood at the counter for a long time saying nothing and thinking things he had no one to say out loud.

Then he remembered the project. The tech team. The investment he had been managing for months and had told himself was the safety net beneath everything else. Whatever happened with Amelia, whatever happened with Sandra, the project was real and it was moving, and when it launched it would fix everything.

He picked up his phone and called the lead developer. The number rang out, and he tried the secondary contact, but it disconnected. He opened his email and searched for the company name, for the registration number from the original documents they had sent him. When he found and entered it into the national business registry search, no results came up.

He tried again, this time with different spellings and variations, and still nothing came up. It was as if the company did not exist. Was this Amelia's doing too? No, that couldn't be. She didn't know anything about tech. Or had he been scammed by these people?

He sat down slowly on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinet, his phone in his hand, and the very particular silence of a man realizing that two floors of a building have just given way and he is only now discovering there was never a ground floor.