I Was His Wife, Then His Widow, Then No One's But My Own novel Chapter 229

The second Nora stepped out of her mentor's office, she was intercepted at the end of the corridor.

Seraphina stood blocking her path, arms crossed and a venomous sneer painted on her lips.

She had obviously been lurking there for a while, explicitly waiting to corner Nora when she was alone.

"Nora, I should have known you'd dig your claws back into Fletcher Medical Center. You really are a piece of work. Every single time, you swear you want nothing to do with us, that you reject the Fletcher name, that you'd never take advantage of the family's resources. And then what? You spin right around and come begging them for a partnership. Your sheer hypocrisy is genuinely stunning."

Nora halted, staring at Seraphina without a single muscle twitching in anger. "You work at the institute. You know damn well that Fletcher Medical Center is the only viable candidate for the Phase Two trials. I didn't choose the Fletchers for personal reasons. I chose them for the data."

Seraphina sneered aggressively. "I'm not going to let you get away with this. You want to bleed the Fletcher empire dry? You think you can use this project to maintain a foothold in the family? Not a chance in hell. The board won't approve it, and neither will I."

Watching the woman work herself into a paranoid frenzy, Nora could only find it pathetic.

Did Seraphina actually believe she was still pining over Finnegan? Did she think this was some elaborate ruse to manufacture run-ins and steal her man?

Nora didn't bother to justify herself. Shaking her head, she simply turned and walked away. Arguing with someone violently hallucinating their own reality was a complete waste of oxygen.

The moment the clock struck the end of the workday, Finnegan's car pulled up smoothly in front of the institute.

Seraphina yanked open the passenger door and slid in. Before she even buckled her seatbelt, she launched into a manic tirade, vomiting up every detail of Nora's pitch to partner with Fletcher Medical Center.

"She's just using this as an excuse to crawl back to you. All that garbage about data and hardware is just a smokescreen!"

Whatever her motives were, allying with the institute was a guaranteed goldmine for the corporation. He had zero reason to reject it, and he absolutely wasn't going to.

Yet he also knew that if he greenlit the deal right now, Seraphina would unleash absolute hell.

So, he opted for silence. He would wait for Nora to formally pitch the contract and play his cards by ear.

The following morning, Nora and her clinical team arrived at the Fletcher Corporation's executive conference room right on schedule.

She was dressed in a razor-sharp navy power suit, her hair slicked back into a low ponytail. Clutching a dense stack of contracts and analytics, she strode into the room, flanked by Felix and two core members of her research team.

Finnegan entered from the opposite doors, trailing several department heads. The two sat directly across the massive mahogany table, their gazes locking for a fraction of a second before both snapped away.