Too Late for Sorry, Mr. Billionaire (Chasing my Wife Back) novel Chapter 148

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THEY were on Chambers Street when it happened.

It was a Saturday afternoon and they had come back to the gallery district because Ifeanyi had been told by a colleague about a bookshop two doors down from the gallery that specialized in architectural texts, and he wanted to find a specific out-of-print title. Then, Amelia had said she would come because she needed a Saturday that did not involve spreadsheets and the bookshop was supposedly excellent.

It was excellent. She spent forty minutes in it and left with three books she hadn't planned to buy, which she considered a mark of quality.

They were walking back toward the car park on the broad tree-lined pavement, Amelia with her books under one arm and Ifeanyi explaining something about the relationship between post-war housing design and community deterioration, which she was genuinely following despite everything, when she saw him.

It was the rigid pose that caught her attention first... the way he was standing on the opposite pavement with the fixed quality of someone who had been there for a while and had not been passing through. Her brain registered him half a second before her conscious mind caught up.

Charles.

Something about him looked wrong. Not wrong in the ways she had last seen him... the wounded pride, the collapsing composure, but wrong in a way she had no name for immediately, a flatness in his bearing that her body understood before her mind did, because her body took one step back before she had decided to.

"Amelia," Ifeanyi said, noticing the change in her immediately. "What—"

The sound came before she finished understanding what she was seeing.

It was sharp, sounded final, and completely at odds with the ordinary Saturday afternoon around it, and for one fractured second the world went entirely silent as her mind tried to make sense of the thing that shouldn't be happening on a bright afternoon on Chambers Street with people and trees and a bookshop she had just been happy inside.

Then, Ifeanyi moved.

She did not see it happen exactly, she was still processing... but she felt the impact of him stepping in front of her, felt the force of it, felt him go down and felt herself going down with him because she was reaching for him without having decided to, both of them on the pavement, her hands already pressing against him before she understood why.

"Ifeanyi," she said. "Ifeanyi, look at me."

He looked at her. His breathing was ragged and wrong at the same time.

"I'm okay," he said, trying to force a smile on his face.

"You are not okay," she said. Her voice was completely steady. She could not account for how her voice was completely steady. "Stay with me. You have to stay with me."

Around them, the street had erupted. There was screaming, running, the chaos of ordinary life violently interrupted, people scattering and people stopping, and some people somewhere were already on a phone, no doubt alerting the authorities of fired shots.

She kept her eyes on Ifeanyi and her hands pressed against him and she kept saying his name with the regular, deliberate rhythm of someone who understood that the voice was an anchor.