Chapter 143 Adrian

Chapter 143 Talia
Her new rival didn't know, she suddenly picked up with a poy laughter. “Oh yes. I've got friends who are with such trashy husbands. I can never be with such a man.” She shrugged.

“I needed someone who would treat me as a princess and I've found it.” 

“Oh yeah.” Amber chuckled further. 

The woman shifted the bag onto her wrist smoothly. She looked like a princess indeed. 

Amber smirked. 

“He said this was the best boutique in the city. He’s very particular when it comes to quality.”

A husband who cheated on her and still called her biggest client to her. 

Fuckkkkk. 

It was still hard for her to believe this was true. 

Amber shifted back, smiling. “We appreciate that,” Her voice was calm and courteous. It took the strongest woman to maintain her composure at such a moment. 

But when the woman left, she dropped to her seat, breathing so hard like she was going to get a seizure. People were too busy to notice. 

Her feet were now stamping angrily on the floor as she tried rewinding what just happened. 

Nausea struck her. She felt like throwing up. Honestly, if anyone would have told her that her angelic husband would do this, she wouldn't have believed. 

“Shittt!” She growled almost too loud before quickly dropping her pitch, realizing she was still in the midst of people. 

She looked through where her new enemy had walked through and a question came to her mind. 

“Will she return back?” She didn't ask her name and more details about her. It would have seemed suspicious. 

She was here alone, dying alone in her dilemma, but the boutique continued to boom, conversations continued, the soft hum of activity persisted. 

Looking up at people, she felt she was an alien trapped in a foreign space. 

A few minutes later, Darla was beside Amber again, as if she had been summoned by instinct alone. She moved like she had eyes in the back of her head and some unexplainable sensitivity to shifts in energy, as though she could detect anything was indeed wrong with her boss. 

She wasn't wrong. 

She pulled up at Amber's side before anyone else even realized it. 

“One sixty-two, confirmed,” Darla said. “Nice sale.”

“Yes,” Amber answered, looking down.

“Your eyes are pale and teary.” Darla leaned closer to look but Amber sprang up. 

“I need to check the extra inventory at the stockroom,” she said and excused herself. 

Darla stared in shock, speechless. 

It was an excuse to step away from the scene for a moment.

She didn’t stay to chat. Instead, she turned and headed toward the stockroom. 

The stockroom was quiet and cool, the air carrying the soft scent of cedar mixed with the faint lavender from the tissue paper used for wrapping orders.

Amber stood between two tall shelving units, her hand resting lightly on the nearest rack. She didn’t move for a moment. 

Darla said her eyes were teary, so she wiped them. She didn’t cry. Not now. She wasn’t the kind of woman who broke like that, not here, not for a suddenly mysterious husband who just decided to turn a narcissist overnight. 

“Doing it to hurt me? I'll hurt him too.” She smirked. “He doesn't know me.” She smirked even louder. 

“Because I've always been simple, humble and loving?” 

In that moment, her good wife trait in her was gone. Vengeful wife mode was activated. 

She stayed completely still, letting everything sink in slowly, like cold water spreading through her when it is poured without rush. 

The photograph. The card. “He told me about this place.” His mistress sweet voice turned sour in her ears vibrated. 

Her boutique, this space she had built piece by piece, year after year, with her own time, money, and relentless effort, rose in her mind with pain. 

The same place Archer had once smiled about at dinner parties, dismissing it as her ‘little project’ as if it were something small, temporary, and unimportant.

Jealousy clicked in her mind. And about him referring his mistress here with the highest amount of money to buy….. 

Was she showing off and him, being narcissistic.

She vowed to follow him with same method. 

Amber stood up a little straighter and gently rolled her shoulders back, as if putting herself back into order. She took one slow breath in and let it out again.

Without looking, she reached into her jacket pocket and found her lipstick exactly where it always was. It had been kept in that same place for years, so her fingers didn’t need to search for it. She uncapped it, applied it carefully to her lips, then closed it again with a soft, familiar click.

Then she stepped back out onto the boutique floor.

The trunk show continued for another two hours, and Amber remained fully present through all of it. What else could it be after she had made up her mind and knew how exactly to go about this? 

She smiled even more than before, laughed more, listened more attentively, while carrying herself with the grace and poise, just like a princess. 

“If a man doesn't makes you a princess, make yourself one.” She told herself. 

To anyone watching, they would notice she was happier now but almost all would think it's the sales she was making. Except Darla who was watching her from afar.  

She sold three additional pieces to a city councilwoman and personally set up a private styling appointment for a client who would be flying in from Dubai the following month.

She stood by the door as the final guest stepped out, offering a radiant, personal thank-you note as they left.

When the boutique finally cleared and it was just her and Darla left inside, the energy of the day began to fade. 

Darla moved through the space, switching off the soft accent lights one by one, letting the glow of Berx Fashion dim into something calmer and quieter.

Amber lowered herself onto the velvet coach near the entrance quietly. She didn't move. She just sat there, looking ahead at nothing specific, as if letting the weight of the day settle around her in silence. More thoughts were coming. 

“Such a blessed day,” Darla called from across the room as she reached for another switch. 

“Yayyyyy,” she dragged dismissively, knowing Darla was coming to question her. 

Darla paused and turned to look at her closely. She had known Amber for the past five years she's been working here, long enough to tell that her boss wasn't alright. 

“Boss,” she said gently.

“I’m fine,” Amber replied at once.

Darla didn’t move. “I didn’t ask.”

Amber looked at her for a moment longer than usual. Just briefly, something unguarded flickered across her expression, something unsteady, something real. Then it disappeared again, sealed back into place as quickly as it had come.

“The woman who spent one sixty-two today,” she said quietly, her voice even but lower than before, “used a card with Archer’s name on it.”