Too Late for Sorry, Mr. Billionaire (Chasing my Wife Back) novel Chapter 147

FRIDAY was unremarkable. That was the thing Amelia would think about afterward. Of how completely ordinary it had been.

She had woken at six-fifteen, made breakfast for the boys, sent Hazel off with her project materials, sat through a morning of back-to-back calls about the resort expansion, eaten lunch at her desk, and left the office at four-thirty because Ryan had told her she was starting to look like someone who lived there, and that was not a compliment.

Ifeanyi had texted her at noon: *Free tonight? There is an architecture exhibit at the gallery on Chambers Street. Opens at six. Come with me, it will be good.*

She had replied: *I have to sort the boys first. Seven-thirty?*

*Seven-thirty works.*

She went home, fed the boys, helped Gabriel with a particularly contentious maths problem that turned out, once they worked through it, to be less contentious than he had believed, and read with Gaddiel for twenty minutes before Hazel came to take over the bedtime routine.

"You are going out?" Hazel asked, looking at Amelia's changed outfit.

"I'm going to this gallery thing with Ifeanyi," Amelia said. "I will be back by ten."

"Have fun," Hazel said easily, turning to hug her mother tightly.

"Lock the door properly." Amelia pointed after Hazel as she picked up her purse from the couch.

"I always lock the door properly, mom." Hazel rolled her eyes.

"You left the back gate open on Wednesday."

"That was different," Hazel said. "I was bringing out the trash to dump it in the bigger trash can outside."

Amelia just chuckled, kissed her on the cheek and left. She drove to the gallery in a light mood of someone who has had a productive week and was about to do something that has nothing to do with work or any of the complicated emotional terrain that had occupied most of her year. The gallery was warm and well-lit and full of the pleasant hum of people looking at interesting things and talking about them. Ifeanyi was already there when she arrived, standing in front of a large installation of suspended geometric forms and wearing the expression of a man forming opinions.

"You are right on time," he said when she found him.

"I'm always on time," she said.

"You were eleven minutes late to your own staff meeting last month. I heard about it from Ryan."

"Ryan has a very large mouth for someone I pay," she clicked her tongue and chuckled.

He laughed and they moved through the exhibit together, which was, as he had promised, genuinely good. They talked about the installations easily and in an argumentative manner that suggested the comfort of two people who had spent enough evenings in conversation to have established their dynamic: he had strong opinions, she interrogated them, neither of them conceded without reason, and it produced something that was consistently more interesting than agreement would have been.

"The third room is the best," he said as they approached it.

"You always say the third room is the best. At every exhibit."

"Because architects understand narrative progression," he said. "The best work is always in the third room. It's where the concept matures."

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