The Secret Pregnancy of the Billionaire's Ex-Wife novel Chapter 315

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Christopher POV

The wedding invitation arrived on a Tuesday in January. The heavy cardstock envelope bore the Shaw family crest, because of course it did. Sean Shaw never missed an opportunity for ostentation.

I almost threw it away unopened. Almost. But something made me open it, my hands steady despite the chaos inside me.

Angela Wilson & Sean Shaw request the honor of your presence…

I read the words without really seeing them. The date, the time, the location–all blurred together. What stood out, in elegant script, was a handwritten note along the bottom margin in Angela’s familiar handwriting:

I hope you’ll be there. It would mean a lot to the children… and to me. – A

I placed the invitation on my desk and walked to the window, staring out at the Mediterranean view without really seeing it. The invitation felt like a death sentence. Final confirmation that those five years had meant nothing–or at least, not enough.

David found me there hours later, still standing at the window, the invitation untouched on my desk.

“Sir?” he ventured carefully. “Will you be attending?”

“No,” I replied without turning around.

He didn’t push, just nodded and quietly left the room. David had been with me long enough to know when to retreat.

For the next two days, I locked myself in my studio–a room I’d once used frequently but had barely entered since returning to New York. Dust covered the easel in the corner, the paints had dried in their tubes, but none of that mattered for what I needed to do.

I worked without sleeping, driven by some desperate need to capture something I was about to lose forever. On fresh canvas, with new paints ordered and delivered within hours, I recreated the moment that had defined the course of my life.

A school library. Bookshelves casting long shadows. A fifteen–year–old girl with amber eyes and fierce determination standing up to bullies, defending a boy she didn’t even know.

I painted her just as I remembered her that day–hair pulled back in a simple ponytail, a blue school sweater, that fire in her eyes that had never dimmed, not even years later. I painted the scene as precisely as memory allowed, every de crystallized by years of revisiting that moment.

If only life could be as it was at first sight…

The painting was, perhaps, the best work I’d ever done. Raw, honest, filled with the emotion of a first meeting that had altered the trajectory of my existence. I carefully wrapped it, packaging it securely, arranging for it to be delivered on the morning of her wedding.

A goodbye gift. A reminder of how we began, now that we had reached our end.

I told David I wouldn’t attend the wedding. Told myself I wouldn’t attend. But as the day approached, I found my resolve weakening.

“Just one glimpse,” I bargained with myself. “Just to see her in her wedding dress.”

The morning of the ceremony, I dressed in my best suit–dark charcoal rather than black, a subtle rebellion against the formality of

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the occasion. I didn’t RSVP, had no invitation in hand, but security a Shaw events had always been predictable. I knew the blind spots, the service entrances, the places where a determined man could slip in unnoticed.

All of New York seemed to be talking about the wedding. The business channels discussed the merger of Shaw Industries and Wilson Investment that would surely follow. Society columns speculated about Angela’s dress, the guest list, the lavish reception to follow.