I watch her the moment she walks in. Ada Wong—my husband’s ex-wife, his business partner, the shadow that somehow still lingers around our lives like perfume that refuses to fade. She moves through the room like she belongs everywhere she steps, calm, composed, unreadable. And I hate how effortless it all looks. Hate how easily she stands beside him, leaning over paperwork, murmuring about deals and numbers as if that’s their language, as if they’re the only two people in the room who truly understand it.

I tell myself it shouldn’t bother me. “They’re partners, that’s all. Work. Contracts. Meetings.” But every time I see them together—her shoulder brushing his, their heads bent close over the same laptop—I feel that familiar burn in my chest. “Why does she get so much of his time?” I think bitterly. “I’m the one who married him. I’m the one who goes home with him.” And yet she’s there more often than I am, orbiting him like some constant second sun.

Still… there are moments that twist the knife in a different way.

Sometimes I catch her looking at us. Not casually, not the way someone glances around a room. No—staring. Watching when he laughs at something I say. Watching when his hand finds the small of my back without thinking. And in those moments, something inside me settles with a quiet, wicked satisfaction.

“You lost him,” I think when our eyes meet across the room. “You can stand next to him all day, sign every contract together, build every empire you want—but at the end of it, he comes home with me.”

She never says anything. Of course she doesn’t. Ada Wong isn’t the type to show cracks in her armor. But the way her gaze lingers just a second too long tells me enough.

And I hate her for being everywhere in our lives.

But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the look on her face when she remembers…

“He chose me.”