THE CEO's REGRET

CHAPTER 13: THE OTHER SIDE

Sebastian's wife wanted to talk, and the terrifying part was that she sounded like someone who was on my side.

I said yes, not immediately. I sat with the phone against my ear long enough that she could hear me deciding… not hesitating, actually deciding, and then I said yes because I had spent sixteen years working with an incomplete version of events and the incompleteness had started to cost me more than the truth ever could.

We met at a restaurant she suggested. Quiet, midweek, the kind of place designed for conversations that needed to stay where they were put.

I arrived first deliberately, ordered water I wouldn't drink, and was already seated and composed when she walked in.

I had seen her in photographs, society pages. The wedding announcement I had found on a Thursday morning that had quietly ended my world. I thought I understood what I was walking into.

I was not entirely right. Claire Sutton-Hale moved through the restaurant with the practiced ease of a woman who had been trained for rooms like this one since childhood. Dressed simply, expensively, blonde hair pulled back with the kind of effortless precision that took considerable effort.

Her posture was perfect, everything about her was perfect. But her eyes, when they found mine across the room, were not the eyes of a woman performing composure for an audience.

They were the eyes of someone who had been carrying something for a very long time and had quietly, privately, decided today was the day she put it down.

She sat and ordered water without looking at the menu. She looked at me directly, and I looked back, and for a moment we simply took each other in, two women shaped by the same man's choices, sitting across from each other for the first time.

"Thank you for coming," she said.

"You said you knew about the trust." I kept my voice even. "Start there."

Something in her expression settled, not offence, something closer to recognition like she had expected exactly this from me and was relieved not to have to warm up to it.

"I'll start before that," she said. "I think the rest won't make sense without it."

I waited.

"I knew who you were before I married him." Her voice was steady, the voice of a woman who had rehearsed these words until they stopped feeling like weapons she was holding.

"Not everything, not the pregnancy, but your name. The fact that you existed and mattered to him in a way I was being asked to stand directly in front of." She paused. "I was twenty-two. My family had an arrangement with the Hales that predated both of us, and I was told Sebastian was ready to move forward. Nobody told me what moving forward had cost someone else."

My hands were flat on the table. I made sure they stayed that way. "You knew something and you married him anyway."

"I knew enough to have asked more questions." She didn't flinch. "By the time I understood what I was actually part of, I was already inside it and the Hale family has a particular way of making leaving feel like something that simply cannot be done."

She took a small breath, but real. "I'm not asking for your sympathy. I made choices and I stayed longer than I should have, but I was not your enemy. I was placed inside a story that already had people in it, and I played the part they gave me, and there has not been a single honest moment in my marriage because of it."

The restaurant moved quietly around us. Someone laughed at a nearby table. The ordinary sound of people having ordinary lunches, completely indifferent to the fact that my entire understanding of sixteen years was being revised in real time.

"The trust," I said.

Claire nodded, her hands folding together on the table like she was gathering herself for the part that cost the most to say.

"Two months after the wedding, Sebastian was struggling. From the outside everything looked controlled, but I lived in the same house and I could see what it was doing to him."

Her voice was quieter now. "He was trying to find you. His father had people monitoring his communications so he couldn't move directly. The trust was the one thing he managed to get through. Ethan helped him, a lawyer Ethan knew, enough layers that Victor never found it."

She held my gaze. "He didn't know where you were. He didn't know if you were safe or well or… he had no idea about the baby, he just knew you were somewhere, and he needed there to be something waiting for you. In case you ever needed it."

Something moved through my chest like a current. I looked down at the table and gave myself three seconds, then I looked back up. "Why are you telling me this?" My voice was steady. I was proud of that. "What does this do for you?"

She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, the careful delivery was gone, something underneath it had broken through, quiet, unguarded and completely real.

"Because you deserve the full picture," she said. "And because I am finished being part of a story I never agreed to. I have been a piece in other people's arrangements for my entire adult life, and I am done." Her eyes didn't move from mine. "You came back, I don't know exactly what for, but whatever you're here to do, you should have the truth while you're doing it."

I looked at her across the white tablecloth. This woman I had spent years flattening into a single image… white dress, wrong church, the moment everything became irreversible.

Now here she was, three-dimensional, tired and shaped by the same machinery that had shaped me, just from a different position inside it.

I didn't forgive her, that wasn't where I was, and I wasn't going to pretend it was. But I saw her, the way you saw someone when they stopped being a symbol and became a person with their own weight to carry. That was something I didn't expect it to be, but it was.

We ate without talking much after that. The food was good. Neither of us paid much attention to it. When the plates were cleared Claire folded her napkin with slow, deliberate hands, the hands of a woman taking a breath before the last thing she'd come to say.

"There's one more thing." Her voice was almost private now. Like something she had held so long it had grown fragile.

I remained still.

"The night before the wedding." She didn't look away from me, not for a second. "Sebastian didn't sleep. I know because I didn't either. We were in separate rooms in the same house and it was completely quiet until…" she stopped, swallowed once. "At 3am I heard him through the wall. He was on the phone."

The restaurant sounds fell away. The whole room narrowed down to her voice and the table between us and the thing she was about to say that I already, somewhere deep and undefended, already knew.

"He was saying your name." The words landed softly, but they landed like something permanent, the kind of thing that, once said, rearranges everything around it and cannot be unsaid, cannot be unfelt, cannot be put back into the silence it came from.

I sat with it, and I didn't move for a long time.