Too Late for Sorry, Mr. Billionaire (Chasing my Wife Back) novel Chapter 145

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TWO months passed and everything went on as usual. The city moved through them the way it always did... without sentiment, without pause, without any particular acknowledgment that the lives happening inside it were doing so at varying speeds and in wildly different directions.

For Amelia, those two months were the kind that accumulated quietly... work, children, small routines, the slow settling of her life after weeks of chaos.

Satin and Sage closed its biggest quarter on record. The resort's expansion broke ground in the second month, which meant three days of back-to-back meetings that exhausted Ryan so thoroughly he fell asleep in her office chair on a Thursday afternoon and she didn't wake him. Ames Roses got a feature in a city lifestyle publication that brought in a wave of new orders, including a commission from a hotel chain that would keep the shop busy through the end of the year.

She was busy. She was genuinely, purposefully, productively busy. And underneath that, she was healing, not with any single moment of revelation, but in the way that real healing happened, through the accumulation of ordinary days in which nothing terrible occurred.

Ifeanyi had found an apartment by the end of the first month. His last night in the guest room had involved a proper Thursday meal — jollof rice with fried plantain and chicken that made Gaddiel sit in reverent silence for almost four minutes, which was a record, and a long conversation at the kitchen table that went past midnight without either of them noticing.

He was easy company in the way of people who were entirely comfortable with themselves, who didn't need the silence to be filled or the conversation to be forced. She had missed him when he left, which had surprised her — not romantically, but in the way you missed a person who had simply made the house feel more alive.

He still came for dinner on occasional Thursdays. The boys still competed for his attention. Hazel had given him her genuine approval, which she conveyed not through words but by occasionally consulting him about her own design-related schoolwork, which Ifeanyi correctly understood as the highest possible endorsement.

Adrian came for his scheduled visits and sometimes for unscheduled ones, and Amelia had stopped making pointed observations about the unscheduled ones. There was something in those visits that she was not yet ready to examine directly... a quality in the way he showed up, quietly without asking for anything, that she kept finding herself thinking about in the spaces between other things.

He hadn't asked about Ifeanyi again after that first morning, and his hadn't tried to explain anything to him.

But something had shifted between them in those two month. It was something small and almost undetectable, like the turning of a season at its very beginning when nothing looks different yet but the quality of the light has changed. But Hazel and the kids noticed, but tried to avoid the conversation with their mother altogether.