Chapter 303 I love you, Fred. I will wait for you.

Chapter 303 I love you, Fred. I will wait for you.

The past few weeks had sat on Frederick like something he couldn't put down and couldn't get comfortable carrying.
He hadn't gone to see Rose. Hadn't called his parents — not since that night with the alcohol and the phone and his father's voice on the other end of a conversation he still couldn't think about clearly.
The pain and regret had taken up permanent residence somewhere behind his sternum, and the desperation to find his way back to Cassie moved underneath everything else like a current that never stopped pulling.
He started where he could. He filed for divorce.
Sienna, it turned out, had done something overnight that resembled wisdom, whether it had grown from genuine change or simply from the accumulated weight of every humiliation she'd absorbed, he couldn't say with certainty.
When they sat down together to work through the terms, her conditions were quieter than he'd expected.
"Fred, I don't want this," she said, her hands folded on the table between them. "But if you're set on it, I can't give back the ten billion." She held his gaze steadily. "I would, if I had it. But I don't. Let that stand as alimony, and I won't ask for anything beyond it."
She had said it hoping it would make him see her differently. Sienna had told herself she was changed, had believed it, genuinely, in the way people believe things when the believing is the only comfort available.
What she hadn't yet understood was that change doesn't work on a timeline you set for yourself. You can decide to become something better today and still spend years living inside the consequences of who you were yesterday.
That was simply how it worked. You reap what you've sown, and the harvest doesn't care about your intentions.
"As much as I want every cent of it back," Frederick said, his voice carrying the particular flatness of someone who has already decided and is simply completing a formality, "I'll accept your terms. You made it easy. I'll give you that."
Sienna's chest tightened as he reached for the pen.
"Fred." Her hand moved to his before she could stop it, and the look he turned on her was cold enough that she pulled back immediately, fingers retreating to her own side of the table.
"I miss Rose," she said, and her voice had cracked open just slightly at the edges. "She feels like my daughter too. Can't we find a way through this?"
Frederick looked at her for a long moment, the way you look at something you once wanted very badly and are now seeing clearly for the first time.
"I could have accepted you," he said. "All of you, the way you were. I would have, if you hadn't spent years poisoning everything I had with Cassie.”
He was certain about it. His love for her was pure but she ruined it with her insecurities and that was how everything he ever felt for her died without remorse.
“The moment I laid eyes on you, I was drawn to you, and though I knew, even then, that Cassie had feelings for me. I never did a single thing to make you feel threatened by that. And still."
He paused, letting the word sit. "You rewrote her in my mind, piece by piece, until I hated her for things she never did. You faked medical results to avoid marrying me. You maneuvered me into marrying her instead and then decided that still wasn't enough.”
His voice turned bitter. “You framed her, set her up with Sebastian, kept building the case against her until I'd made her life genuinely miserable for seven years."
His jaw tightened. "Seven years, Sienna. While she kept trying to be good. While she kept showing up. Even after you came out of that coma, I chose you over her. I accepted her divorce for your sake. And you still went after her."
He set the pen against the paper.
"You suggested I send Rose to boarding school, meaning you never loved that child. And I cannot keep carrying this marriage." He signed his name in one clean motion. "Sign it. Let's both move on."
A single tear made its way down Sienna's cheek. She sat with it for a moment, with the full and undeniable understanding of everything she had set in motion, how every move she'd made against Cassie had pushed her closer to the edge that had dropped her straight into Franklin's world, Franklin's life, Franklin's arms.
If she had known, or thought even one step further ahead but she hadn't. And now here they were.
"I love you, Fred," she said quietly. "I'll wait for you. But I'll give you what you're asking for."
She signed.
The breath Frederick let out carried years in it. Two marriages. Two divorces. Both of them cleaner than they had any right to be, given everything.
He stood up from the table already knowing what came next. Cassie was the goal, and Rose was the only door still open to him.