The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 276

The Life That Followed 

HANNAH’S POV: 

Better late than losing her somewhere else. I was choosing to hold onto that. 

The next morning she arrived with a printed document and placed it in front of me. 

I looked at the number at the top. 

“That is the market rate,” she said. 

I looked at the number for a moment. 

“It is on the higher end of the market rate,” I said. 

“It is accurate for this city and this level of responsibility,” she said. “I can send you the sources if you would like.” 

“You have sources?” I said. 

“I have three sources,” she said. “And a comparison table.” 

I looked at the comparison table she produced from behind the printed document. It was thorough in a way that was so completely Maya that I almost laughed. 

“You prepared this before I offered you the role,” I said. 

“I prepared it when I started to suspect you were going to offer me the role,” she said. “That was approximately four months ago.” 

He had presented the full Kelloway documentation with the same straightforwardness he had brought to the public statement, no performance of remorse, no defensive positioning, just a clear and complete account of what the deal had been and what he thought of it now and what he had done and become in the years since. He told the board that the story had been placed deliberately to destabilize his family during a period when they were in the middle of something that had attracted powerful enemies, and that he was not making excuses for Kelloway, which had been wrong and he owned that, but that he was also not going to pretend the timing was coincidence. 

Prentiss, the board chairman, had said afterward in the kind of understated language that meant he was genuinely moved: that was the most honest presentation I have seen in twenty years of board meetings. 

The story had continued to circulate in some corners of the financial press for another week and then it ran out of new things to say and stopped. The board held. Two investors who had been watching the situation with concern sent messages expressing their continued confidence. One piece in a credible business publication noted that Martinez Holdings’ response to the crisis, transparency and accountability rather than denial, had been unusual and had been received well by people who understood the difference between a man who had done something questionable in the past and a man who still would. 

Elijah did not make a big thing of any of this. He was not someone who needed the world to know he had come through something. He just kept going, kept working, kept showing up in the morning with coffee and the same steady presence he always had. 

He was not that person who I met years ago anymore. 

He was someone who called Jacob on a bad morning and stood on kitchen floors and made toast and showed up to his children’s drama performances and sat with his wife in Adele’s house looking at the stars. 

I was very glad to be married to him and gave him a second chance. That was not a complex feeling and itt was just true.