Chapter 873:

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He leaned down, his voice barely a breath, spoken for no conscious ear. “Do you regret it, Haleigh? Leaving?”

Her eyelids fluttered. A soft sound escaped her lips.

He leaned closer, desperate. “Do you still love me?”

In the hazy space between sleep and waking, she felt a familiar presence — a ghost from a life she had lost. A single word, little more than a breath, slipped past her lips.

“Kane…”

T𝘩e 𝖻e𝗌𝘁 𝗿e𝘃іew𝗌 𝗈ո 𝘨𝘢𝗅ոo𝘃𝖾𝘭𝗌.𝘤𝘰m

And then she was still, leaving him alone in the quiet — with his unanswered questions, and the woman who had shattered his world now sleeping in his home.

The morning light — thin and gray — was the first thing Haleigh registered. It sliced through the blinds, painting pale stripes across a room that was not her own. The sheets carried his scent, clean and familiar, a ghost she had spent six years trying to forget.

The door opened. Kane walked in already dressed in a crisp shirt and trousers, carrying two mugs of coffee. He set one on the nightstand beside her — the gesture so deceptively domestic it made something ache behind her sternum.

“We’re divorced,” Haleigh whispered. The words came out less like a statement and more like a plea.

“That’s right.” A faint, bitter smile touched Kane’s lips. He sat on the edge of the bed, his presence filling the room, pressing the air from her lungs. “We’re divorced. And we won’t get back together. But I won’t remarry, and you can forget about marrying anyone else. For a lifetime. We agreed.”

Was any of this normal? Of course not. It was possessive and irrational and entirely without logic. But hearing the words again in the cold gray light of morning, Haleigh felt that same strange, traitorous wave of relief move through her. She had never seriously considered finding another man. And the thought of Kane with another woman was a pain she had no name for. So this arrangement — twisted and broken as it was — made a terrible kind of sense.

“So what now?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. The fight had drained out of her overnight, leaving behind only a vast, tired emptiness.

“Now,” he said, leaning closer, his face inches from hers, “you let me handle the Barretts. You wanted to plant seeds of doubt? I’ll burn their entire forest down for you.”

The offer hung in the air between them — a gilded cage. It was everything she wanted and the one thing she couldn’t easily accept. But she was exhausted, hollowed out, desperately tired of the woman she had become — caught in an impossible arrangement with a man she was supposed to have left behind years ago.

“And in return?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

He smiled — slow, deliberate, a curving of his lips that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “In return, you stay. You stop running into situations you can’t control. You let me handle it. You let me take care of you.”

It wasn’t a choice. It was a beautifully worded surrender.

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