Chapter 242 - 0242: You Need To Leave

Chapter 242: Chapter 0242: You Need To Leave

Graham’s Point Of View

"But I never asked for it."

The words hung there for a second, suspended in the stale office air. They didn’t echo and they didn’t soften; they just sat between us like something sharp and deliberate, a blade left out on a table for anyone to pick up.

Lillian looked like I had physically struck her. Her eyes widened, not dramatic and not theatrical, just stunned, and her mouth opened slightly, then closed, then opened again, like her brain had stalled mid-sentence and was scrambling to find language that made sense of what I’d just said.

I watched the color drain slowly from her cheeks, watched her try to rebuild her composure piece by piece, the way someone gathers scattered papers after a gust of wind, knowing some of them are already lost.

She blinked once, then twice, then straightened slowly, shoulders pulling back, her hand still curled around the strap of the lunch bag like it was the only solid thing left in the room. I could see her knuckles whiten against the fabric, could see the small tremor working its way up her wrist.

"Graham," she said, and this time there was no softness in it, no pet names, no warmth cushioning the edges. "How can you say that?"

I didn’t answer immediately, because I knew how it sounded. Cruel. Dismissive. Cold. But my head was already splitting open with everything else, and I didn’t have space for delicacy, not today, not with the walls already closing in from every direction. Every second I spent explaining myself felt like a second I couldn’t afford to lose.

"You don’t have to request it before I know what you need," she continued, her voice rising just slightly, trying to stay composed but failing at the corners. "That’s the whole point of..."

I cut her off.

"I never asked for your sympathy."

Her name slipped out wrong.

"Elena."

The second it left my mouth, her entire face changed. Shock first, then confusion, then something uglier, something that looked dangerously close to grief, the kind that settles into a person’s features before they’ve even decided to let it.

"It’s Lillian," she said quietly, and the quiet was somehow worse than if she’d shouted it.

I didn’t correct myself and I didn’t apologize, and I barely even registered the mistake, because the name in my head was the wrong one for a reason I wasn’t going to look at, not now, maybe not ever. The thought slid past before I could catch it, and I let it go, because catching it meant facing something I had no room for today.

"You only have one job," I went on, my tone flattening in a way that even I knew was dangerous territory. "And that’s to carry my child. Don’t forget that."

The silence that followed was suffocating, the kind that presses against your ribs and makes the air feel thin, the kind that makes you aware of your own heartbeat.

She gasped, actually gasped, her hand flying to her chest like the air had been sucked straight out of her lungs. "One job?" she repeated, her voice thin and disbelieving. "You think that’s all I am?"

I exhaled sharply, already irritated with how this was spiraling, how quickly the ground had shifted beneath us. "Don’t twist my words."

"I don’t need to twist them!" she shot back, stepping forward despite herself, despite the way her hand still trembled against the lunch bag. "You just reduced me to a vessel in one sentence!"

"That’s not what I said."

"It’s exactly what you said!"

Her voice cracked on the last word, and that crack did something strange to my chest, not enough to soften me, but enough to make me angrier at the entire situation. Because this wasn’t supposed to be the conversation today. Today was already a mess before she walked in here with homemade lunch and expectations, before any of this spilled into the open where neither of us could take it back.

"You walk in here unannounced," I snapped, running a hand through my hair, pacing once because standing still felt impossible, "when I’m clearly dealing with something serious, and then you expect gratitude?"

"I expected basic decency!" she fired back, her chin lifting even as her eyes betrayed her.

Her eyes were glassy now, but she wasn’t crying, she was holding it together by sheer will, and something about that restraint made the moment feel even heavier, even more unbearable than tears would have. "I’m carrying your child, Graham. I haven’t slept properly in weeks. My back hurts constantly. I can’t even bend down without feeling like my spine is splitting. And you’re standing there telling me my only job is to carry your child?"

The words hit harder than I wanted them to, landing somewhere beneath my ribs where I couldn’t easily dismiss them, but instead of apologizing, I doubled down, because anger was easier than vulnerability, had always been easier. "You knew what this arrangement was," I said.

"Arrangement?" she whispered, like the word physically hurt, like it had teeth. "That’s what you call this?"

"What else would you call it?"

"I called it a life!" Her voice rose, and I noticed, distantly, that her hand was trembling harder now on the strap of the bag. "You sat in my kitchen in March and told me the marriage was dead. You told me she doesn’t look at you, that you sleep in separate wings of that house like museum exhibits. You cried, Graham. I watched you cry into my shoulder about how lonely you were, and I thought, this man, I’m going to give this man everything. And now I’m standing here six months pregnant and I’m an arrangement with one job."

"That was March. Things are different now."

"Things are different now," she repeated, and laughed, a short, incredulous sound that didn’t hold any humor at all, more exhale than laughter. "God, I was so stupid."

"That’s enough."

"No," she shook her head, tears finally spilling over despite her effort to hold them back. "You don’t get to silence me. Not after that."

I felt something tightening in my chest, the air thinning again, pressure building from all directions, my pulse ticking up in a way that had nothing to do with her anymore and everything to do with the message I hadn’t yet received, though I didn’t know that yet.

"This isn’t about you," I said, more to convince myself than her.

"Everything is always about you!" she shot back. "Your company. Your rules. Your timing. Your moods."

Her words overlapped with the chaos already brewing in my head. Encrypted messages. Divorce. Dead ends. Scott’s warning. Each thought arrived faster than the last, stacking up until I could barely separate one from another, until the room itself seemed to tilt slightly under the weight of it all.

And then my phone chimed, sharp and clean and violent in its timing, and we both froze. The sound sliced straight through the argument like a blade through fabric, clean and final.

Her eyes dropped to my pocket, and mine were already there. For a split second neither of us moved, and then instinct took over and I grabbed the phone, my hands not steady, which I didn’t realize until I nearly dropped it unlocking the screen.

A new message. Unknown number. Of course.

I opened it, and as I read, something inside me shifted, not slowly and not gradually, but instantly, like a floor giving way beneath me, like the whole room had tilted on an axis I couldn’t see.

I know you might be wondering what I want you to do. It’s simple. It won’t take you a minute and you’ll get it done. I want you to divorce Elena. You’ll be receiving the papers since you destroyed the one she gave you. And I’ll be waiting for the signed documents. You have an hour.

The words blurred for a second, not because I couldn’t read them, but because my brain refused to process them fast enough. Destroying papers. Elena. Divorce. An hour. Each phrase landed like a separate blow, and I had to read the message twice before the shape of it fully settled, before the full weight of it dropped into my stomach like a stone.

My pulse started hammering, loud enough that I could feel it in my throat.

Lillian was still talking, something about how she wasn’t going to stand there and be disrespected, but her voice faded into background noise, and the room felt distant, like I’d stepped slightly outside my own body, watching the scene unfold from somewhere just out of reach, a bystander to my own unraveling.

"You okay?" she asked finally, noticing the shift in me, the way my face must have changed.

I didn’t answer. I read it again, slowly, every line, every implication. They knew. Not just about the investors, not just about the threats, they knew about the divorce papers, the ones I’d torn apart weeks ago, the ones I thought were handled, the ones only two people were supposed to know about. The realization crawled up my spine, cold and deliberate, settling into my bones like something that intended to stay.

My grip tightened around the phone until my knuckles ached.

"How..." I muttered under my breath.

"Graham?" Lillian stepped closer again, this time cautiously, her anger momentarily eclipsed by something more watchful. "What is it?"

I looked up at her. Really looked at her. Pregnant, emotional, standing in my office with homemade lunch and tear-streaked cheeks, caught in the wreckage of a conversation that had started as an accusation and ended as something far more dangerous. And suddenly she felt like part of a much bigger problem, a complication I didn’t have the bandwidth to manage alongside everything else closing in, though the thought made something in me twist with guilt I didn’t have time to examine.

"You need to leave," I said.

Her face fell instantly, the hurt flashing across it before she could mask it. "Excuse me?"

"Now."

"I’m not leaving until you explain what’s going on."

"You don’t want to know."

"Try me."

Her stubbornness would’ve been admirable on another day, might even have made me smile. Today it just grated, scraping against nerves already worn thin to the point of fraying.

"This doesn’t concern you."

"I’m carrying your child!" she snapped. "Everything that concerns you concerns me!"

I let out a sharp breath, running a hand through my hair again, my head pounding now with a pressure that felt almost physical. "They want me to divorce Elena," I said finally.

The words felt strange out loud, stranger still watching them land on her face, watching her expression shift from anger to something closer to disbelief.

She froze. "What?"

"They want me to divorce her," I repeated, my voice lower now, colder, the reality of it settling in with each syllable. "And they’re giving me an hour."

Silence, thick and disbelieving, stretched between us like something physical.

"That’s..." she swallowed. "That’s ridiculous."

I let out a humorless laugh, short and bitter. "That’s not even the worst part."

Her brows furrowed. "What do you mean?"

"They know I destroyed the papers."

Her face drained of color, the last traces of her anger replaced entirely by something closer to fear. "How would anyone know that?"

Exactly. That was the problem, and I had no answer that didn’t terrify me further, no explanation that didn’t make the walls feel like they were inching closer.

"Do you understand what that means?" she said, and for the first time all morning her voice had gone quiet instead of sharp, quiet in a way that felt more alarming than any amount of shouting. "That happened in your study, Graham. Behind your doors. If they know that, then they know things that happen inside your own house. What else do they know? Do they know about me? About the baby?"

I didn’t answer, and my silence answered for me, filling the space where reassurance should have been.

"Oh my God," she breathed, one hand drifting protectively to her stomach. "You think they do."

"I don’t think anything yet."

"You don’t think anything yet? An anonymous person is dismantling your company and ordering you to sign papers within the hour, and you don’t think anything yet? Graham, whoever this is, is doing this for her. Nobody terrorizes a man into a divorce unless they want the wife. Do you hear me? Someone wants Elena, and they’re burning your whole life down to clear the path." She pressed a hand flat against her belly, and her voice cracked, the fear finally breaking through the composure she’d fought so hard to maintain. "And we’re standing in the middle of it with a lunch bag."

The message blinked back at me on the screen. You have an hour.

My jaw tightened until it ached. This wasn’t random and it wasn’t chaotic. This was controlled and precise, someone orchestrating every move like they were five steps ahead, watching me react in real time, savoring it perhaps, and the fact that they ended it so casually, so confidently, made my blood run cold. Whoever they were, they had patience, and patience was so much worse than rage. Rage burned out. Patience waited, and watched, and struck exactly when it mattered most.

At the bottom of the screen, the final two words sat there, unapologetic and commanding, daring me to ignore them.

Get moving.