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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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2026-04-30 05:58:35
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Affair With My Stepfather Christmas
Linda spent Christmas with her sister.Zara found out from a text, not from Linda directly but relayed through the aunt, a general message sent to the wider family letting everyone know the arrangements for the holiday. Linda would be at her sister's from the twenty-third through to the new year. Anyone who wanted to visit was welcome.Zara read the message three times.She was not invited specifically. She was also not excluded specifically. It was the kind of ambiguous inclusion that Linda's family had always practiced, the wide net of an extended family gathering where anyone with the right blood was theoretically welcome and the specific dynamics of who actually wanted to be in the same room were left to sort themselves out privately.She did not go.She spent Christmas Eve with Ethan in her flat, the two of them cooking a meal that was too elaborate for two people and eating far too much of it, and on Christmas morning they opened the small gifts they had bought each other, a set
Affair With My Stepfather Home
They flew back on Sunday afternoon.The two days had felt longer than two days, the particular stretched quality of time that happened when you did a great deal of living inside a short span. Zara sat in the window seat with her notebook full of sketches and Ruth's phone number and photographs of medieval plot surveys that Ruth had emailed her that morning before they left, and she looked out at the clouds and thought about how much had shifted in forty-eight hours.A building. A flat with a fireplace and a view toward the water. Dinner with people who felt, already, like the beginning of a life rather than a project.Ethan was beside her, working through emails he had let accumulate over the weekend, and every so often he would show her something on his screen, a message from Daniel about the waterfront site or a query from the Aldren client that had somehow reached him instead of her, and she would glance at it and comment and go back to her sketches.It was easy. It had become easy
Affair With My Stepfather 59- Dinner With James
The restaurant James chose was on a side street off George Street, small and warm and the kind of place that had been there long enough to have developed its own particular character without trying to. Dark wood, good lighting, a menu that was confident rather than ambitious. She liked it immediately.James's wife was called Ruth. She was small and precise with the particular energy of someone whose mind was always doing something even when the rest of her was still. She studied medieval urban history at the university and her current research was about the development of Edinburgh's street plan in the fourteenth century and she talked about it the way people talked about things they genuinely loved, without performing the love, just being inside it.Zara found her immediately interesting.They were seated at a round table, the four of them, and the wine arrived and the menus arrived and within ten minutes the conversation had split naturally into two, James and Ethan talking about th
Affair With My Stepfather 58- The Flat
They found it on the second day. They were not scheduled to look until the spring, until the project formally started and the timeline made practical sense. But James had mentioned over dinner the previous evening that a colleague of his had a flat available in the New Town, a short-term let that could convert to longer term if the tenants wanted it, and he had passed on the details in the casual way of someone who was not making a recommendation so much as offering information that might or might not be useful.Ethan had looked at Zara across the dinner table.She had looked at him.Neither of them said anything about it that evening. But in the morning, after the building visit, after the afternoon in James's office going through drawings and staircase options and material specifications, when James mentioned the flat again and said his colleague was happy to show it if they had an hour, she had said yes before Ethan could answer.The flat was on the third floor of a Georgian terra
Affair With My Stepfather 57- The Building
James met them outside at nine the following morning.He was tall, slightly younger than Ethan, with the relaxed confidence of someone who had been good at his work long enough to stop needing to demonstrate it. He shook Ethan's hand the way old colleagues shook hands, briefly and without ceremony, and then he turned to Zara and said he had seen the Aldren project and had been genuinely impressed and she thanked him genuinely because he said it the way people said things they meant rather than things they were required to say.The building was on a side street off the Royal Mile, not the tourist part, the residential end where the street narrowed and the buildings pressed close and the stone had the particular dark quality of Edinburgh stone that absorbed light differently from anything she had worked with before. Four storeys. Originally a merchant's townhouse from the early nineteenth century, converted to offices sometime in the nineteen seventies in ways that had not been kind to
Affair With My Stepfather 56 - Edinburgh
They took the train north in the first week of December.Four hours. She had a window seat and her laptop open and coffee going cold beside her and for the first hour she genuinely worked, or genuinely tried to, the restaurant drawings requiring decisions she had been deferring and the train's rhythm being good for that kind of thinking. Then somewhere past the halfway point the landscape changed and she stopped pretending to look at the screen.The hills. The particular quality of the light up here, lower and clearer than what they had left behind, doing something extraordinary to the brown and grey of the November moorland. She had forgotten this about Scotland, or had never known it properly, having only passed through. The sky was bigger. That was the simplest way to say it. The sky was bigger and the land underneath it felt older and the light between them had a quality she was already thinking about in terms of the Edinburgh project, what it would mean for the interiors, how you
Affair With My Stepfather CHAPTER FOUR
She couldn't sleep. Midnight. Zara lay on top of the covers in her childhood bedroom, still wearing her dress because she hadn't gotten around to changing and now it seemed like too much effort, staring at the ceiling with the particular stillness of someone who had stopped fighting their own thou
Affair With My Stepfather CHAPTER THREE
"Zara, this is Ethan. Ethan — my daughter."He extended his hand.She shook it.The handshake lasted one second longer than it should have. His grip was firm and warm and entirely unhurried, and she felt it travel from her palm up through her wrist and settle somewhere it had no business settling.
Affair With My Stepfather CHAPTER TWO
The dress was black and simple. The kind of simple that required standing in front of the wardrobe for twenty minutes discarding everything else first.It fit the way good things fit — like it had been waiting for her specifically. The neckline was modest. The cut was not. it stopped above her knee
Affair With My Stepfather CHAPTER ONE
The house smelled the same. Familiar. That was the first thing Zara Cole noticed as she stepped through the front door — that particular combination of her mother's vanilla candles, old oak floorboards and something else that had no name but meant home in the most complicated way possible. 3 years
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