Too Late for My Husband’s RegretChapter 1
Isabella's POV
“I’ll take the marriage.”
The words did not echo in the boardroom. They didn’t need to. They landed with the soft finality of a verdict, the kind no one argues with because the sentence has already been carried out.
My father’s pen froze above the contract. The only sound was the quiet ticking of the glass wall clock behind him, each second marking the death of the deal we were all pretending hadn’t already collapsed.
Serena’s breath hitched beside me. It wasn’t loud. Serena never let her reactions be loud. Her strength lay in control — in the polished beauty that made her seem gentle while every movement was calculated.
“You?” my father said at last, voice stripped of warmth. “Isabella, stop this nonsense.”
“I’m not joking.”
“You’re emotional.”
“No,” I replied. “I’m being practical.”
The conference table stretched between us like a battlefield — contracts, legal pads, untouched coffee cups growing cold. The Grantstone merger had been frozen for six months, ever since Julian Grant had collapsed during a closed-door board meeting in Zurich. No warning. No diagnosis the doctors could agree on. Just silence where the heir to one of the country’s largest biomedical conglomerates had once been.
Alive, but not awake.
A son in a bed and a billion-dollar empire with no legal hand to steer it.
The Grant family charter required a married heir before majority voting rights transferred to the next generation. Julian had signed it himself at twenty-five, back when he still strode into rooms like he owned the oxygen.
A clause meant to preserve stability.
Now it was strangling it.
Serena had been selected as his bride two years ago. She was perfect on paper — younger daughter of a respected industrialist, well-educated, photogenic, emotionally pliable. The kind of woman investors trusted to look sincere in public while letting other people make the real decisions.
Until reality arrived.
“I can’t marry someone who doesn’t even know I exist,” Serena had said earlier, tears clinging delicately to her lashes as she leaned into my stepmother’s shoulder. “What if he never wakes up? I’ll be trapped in a marriage with a ghost.”
My father hadn’t argued. He didn’t need to. The room had slowly, inexorably turned toward me.
Because there was always a second daughter.
There was always a contingency.