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2026-09-08 00:08:39
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After the Divorce, My Ex Husband Came Crawling Back 181
ARIANAEleanor looks satisfied in the way only she manages to look satisfied, entirely without triumph on the surface, all of it underneath, though there's warmth threaded through this particular satisfaction that I don't remember from a year ago. We've built something here, slowly, without either of us quite naming it. I find myself glad of it more than I expected to be.I tell her about Maxwell then, because it seems necessary, the custody arrangement, the overnights, the fact that any change to the twins' schedule technically needs to go through him."I already know," she says, before I've finished."You know about the custody agreement?""I know rather more about Maxwell Cox than I'd like to." Something flickers across her face, brief and cold. "I've never cared for him. Not as a boy, and certainly not now.""He'll want to know why the twins are here for two weeks instead of the usual schedule.""I'll send him a notice of my own." She waves a hand like the matter is already resol
After the Divorce, My Ex Husband Came Crawling Back 180
ARIANAI haven't fully landed since the penthouse.Durrell is alive. That fact keeps circling back through me at strange moments: folding laundry, watching the twins argue over the same crayon they always argue over, and standing in the shower longer than I need to. He’s alive, and bound, and further away than an ocean can measure. I've been carrying it around like something too large to set down and too fragile to hold properly either.So when the notice comes through from the Bindy estate, formal as always, requesting my presence at my earliest convenience, I almost let it slide another day before I remember that Eleanor doesn't send notices that wait.I go the same afternoon.Her study smells the way it always does, old paper and something floral I've never identified, and something is steadying in that familiarity now, a year in, that I didn't expect when I first walked through these doors a stranger with her blood and none of her history. She's seated behind her desk when I arr
After the Divorce, My Ex Husband Came Crawling Back 179
ARIANAVictor is standing near the windows when I arrive, and he looks thinner than the man who left Lakebridge two weeks ago. His sharper edges have softened into something tired, something that hasn't slept properly in longer than a night. Selene sits on the couch nearby, watching him the way you'd watch someone recovering from surgery, careful, and alert, like she's tracking every breath he takes. I file the strangeness of that away for later. Right now there's only room in me for Durrell."Sit," Victor says.I don't. "What happened?"He tells me, eventually, in pieces I have to physically brace myself to hear. Durrell is alive. Durrell was taken. A family called Kraven, a blood I've never heard spoken of, holding him in a city across an ocean because of a mother he spent his whole life grieving without answers.“Thank God.” I sigh with relief.The relief I feel is sharp and overwhelming, my whole body sagging with it before the rest of the sentence catches up and steals it bac
After the Divorce, My Ex Husband Came Crawling Back 178
VICTORI don't sleep the night before she comes. I lie in the dark going over every way to say it, and every version fails the same test.There's no sentence that tells a woman the man she loves is a hostage without also telling her the world just changed shape underneath her feet. I've delivered hard news before, board failures, deaths, betrayals dressed up as business decisions. This is different. This is a woman who trusted me with the one thing she couldn't protect herself, and I'm about to hand it back to her broken.Selene is already awake when I come out of the bedroom, sitting on the couch with her knees drawn up, watching me the way she's watched me every morning since Niveria, careful, alert, like she's still cataloguing whether I'm going to collapse again. I've stopped telling her to stop, because it doesn't work, and some small, unfamiliar part of me doesn't entirely want it to."You look like you didn't sleep," she says."I didn't." "You want me here for this?"I con
After the Divorce, My Ex Husband Came Crawling Back 177
VICTORAlmost two weeks after Niveria, we finally land back in Lakebridge.I still feel it in my chest sometimes, a tightness that isn't quite pain anymore, just the memory of pain, lingering the way a bruise lingers after the color's already faded. The doctors say I'm cleared to travel, cleared to work in moderation, cleared to resume something close to a normal life. They don't know what normal looks like for a man who's just watched a death sentence he thought he understood reach thirty thousand feet to try to kill him.I know something now that I didn't know two weeks ago. Durrell isn't coming home soon. Maybe not for a long while yet, and I don't know how to tell Ariana that.I've rehearsed it on the flight, different versions, softer ones, harder ones, none of them land anywhere close to true without also landing somewhere close to unbearable. There's no way to tell a woman raising two toddlers alone that the man she loves is alive, as far as I know, but bound to a year he ca
After the Divorce, My Ex Husband Came Crawling Back 176
ARIANAI sit in my car outside Max's house for a long time before I trust myself to drive.I didn't agree to anything. I never gave him the concession he's already celebrating somewhere behind that closed door. My silence was not a yes. But I let him believe it was, and I don't fully understand yet why I did that, except that walking away felt like the only thing I had the strength left to do.What frightens me isn't the filing. Alaric can handle the filing. It isn't even the ultimatum, ugly as it was, because I already know exactly what it was for. It was never about the twins. It was about making sure I stay reachable to him, and unreachable to anyone else.What frightens me is what happened before I told him to stop.I close my eyes, and I can still feel it, the second my body answered something my mind wanted no part of, the second his gentleness got past every wall I thought I'd built since the divorce. I told myself I was long past reacting to Maxwell Cox like that. I believe
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