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CHAPTER TWENTY

Author: Naya
last update publish date: 2026-05-02 05:01:03

Zara tries.

Four days. She gives it four full days and she means it — she is not the kind of woman who makes a promise and performs keeping it. She actually tries. She stops engineering reasons to be near Ethan. Stops choosing her outfits the way she had been choosing them. She puts distance between them at meals and fills her hours with work, with phone calls, with the ordinary texture of a life that has nothing to do with the man sleeping down the hall.

It is harder than it should be.

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  • Affair With My Stepfather    TWENTY NINE

    Chapter Twenty-NineTwo NightsLinda left on Friday morning.Her sister's house, two nights, planned well in advance. She had packed Thursday evening with the organised cheerfulness of a woman who trusted her household completely, asked Ethan three times if he was absolutely sure he would be fine, asked Zara twice if she needed anything from the shops before she left, kissed them both at the door and was gone by eight o'clock.The gate clicked shut.The house went quiet.Zara stood at the kitchen window and listened to the quiet.Ethan stood at the kitchen doorway with his coffee.Neither of them spoke for a moment. There was something almost funny about it, the two of them standing in this kitchen with forty-eight hours of empty house and neither of them knowing how to begin it."We should probably be sensible about this," Ethan said."Probably.""Two nights is two nights. It does not have to mean—""I know.""We could use the time to actually talk. About where this is going.""Very

  • Affair With My Stepfather    TWENTY EIGHT

    The guilt arrived properly on a Sunday. Not the version she had been carrying since the wedding. Not the small familiar stone below her sternum that she had learned to move around without thinking about. The real kind. The specific kind. The kind that came with a face. All three of them were in the garden. Linda had announced it a garden day at breakfast with the authority of someone who had been planning it for a while and produced gloves and trowels and a diagram she had apparently sketched at some point during the week. Ethan took the far end with the heavier digging. Zara took the middle section. Linda directed both of them from a low stool she had carried out from the kitchen with the calm assurance of a woman in charge of something she cared about. It was a good morning. The sun was out. The work was satisfying in the way that physical work was satisfying when it had an immediate visible result. Linda kept making them stop for tea and biscuits and talking about what she wante

  • Affair With My Stepfather    TWENTY SEVEN

    She woke before him. The room was still dark, that particular grey that came before sunrise when the world had not yet decided to begin. She lay still and listened. Rain, somewhere outside, light and far away. The house completely quiet. No third step creaking. No kettle. Nothing. Ethan was on his back beside her with one arm thrown wide and his face slack, the jaw unclenched, the management entirely gone. He looked younger like this. She had never seen him sleep before and she lay there and let herself look properly now that she had the chance. The grey at his temples. The dark lashes against his cheek. The line of his throat above the collar of his shirt and the rise and fall of his chest, slow and even, a man genuinely at rest. Three years. She had carried a summer for three years without knowing she was carrying it and now he was in the room she had grown up in and it felt nothing like she had imagined it might feel if she ever found her way back to him. It felt heavier. Bett

  • Affair With My Stepfather    TWENTY SIX

    Still Here The kitchen was quiet. The kind of quiet that came after something big. The overhead light was still on, the wine glass was still on the counter where she left it, and the clock above the door kept moving like nothing in this room had shifted. Everything looked the same as it had an hour ago. Nothing was the same as it had been an hour ago. Zara leaned against the counter with her arms crossed and looked at Ethan. He was a few feet away, shirt not entirely sorted, hair undone from her hands. He was looking at her without any of the usual arrangement in his face. No composure held in place on purpose. Just him, standing in this kitchen at nearly eleven at night, looking at her like he was still working out what he had just done. She knew what he had done. So did he. "Say something," she said. "What do you want me to say?" "Anything. You have gone very quiet." He looked at the counter. Then back at her. "I don't have words for this right now. I am sorry. It is the b

  • Affair With My Stepfather    TWENTY FIVE

    She came downstairs at eight.Ethan was already in the kitchen. White shirt, sleeves rolled though it was barely morning. Coffee in his hand. He looked up when he heard her on the stairs and this time he did not rearrange his face before she could see it.Linda was not down yet.Zara poured her coffee and leaned against her side of the counter. The kitchen held them the way it always did, warm and quiet, full of everything neither of them had finished saying. Outside the window the garden was bright. The clock ticked in the hallway. Somewhere a car started on the street."How did you sleep?" Ethan asked."Two hours on a bedroom floor.""Same."He almost smiled. She did smile."We need to talk," he said."We talked last night.""That wasn't talking.""Some of it was talking."He set his mug down. His jaw tightened the way it did when he was about to say something he had prepared. "What happened last night, Zara. It cannot become a pattern.""You keep saying things cannot happen and the

  • Affair With My Stepfather    TWENTY FOUR

    She decides to leave. Thursday evening, bag half packed on the bed, the decision already made and steady in her chest. She will go back to her flat. Work the Aldren commission remotely — she has done it before. Distance will handle the rest. Distance and time and the basic mercy of not being in the same house as Ethan Harlow every morning. She is folding the navy dress when the knock comes. Three knocks. Quiet. Measured. She knows before she opens the door. Ethan stands in the low light of the hallway and he is not composed. He is not the managed version. He is the other one — the one she had only seen in kitchens at 2am and on back porches in the dark — and he is looking at her the way she has been carrying for three years without knowing she was carrying it. Like she is something he cannot solve and has stopped trying to. She opens the door wider. He comes in. They end up on the floor with their backs against the bed because the chair feels wrong for this and neither of them

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