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CHAPTER 67

last update Date de publication: 2026-07-07 20:40:41

ANNA'S POV

I did not have the luxury of sitting with the uncertainty as long as I wanted to, much as some part of me had hoped for a little more time before facing what came next.

Three days after the test, Doctor Ellison's office called to confirm my long overdue physical, the same appointment I had been putting off since before Lucas died. I almost canceled it, telling myself I could reschedule once I had more time to think, once the rest of my life felt less like a series of collapsing walls
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  • Anna and Jonathan: The Arranged Marriage    CHAPTER 67

    ANNA'S POVI did not have the luxury of sitting with the uncertainty as long as I wanted to, much as some part of me had hoped for a little more time before facing what came next.Three days after the test, Doctor Ellison's office called to confirm my long overdue physical, the same appointment I had been putting off since before Lucas died. I almost canceled it, telling myself I could reschedule once I had more time to think, once the rest of my life felt less like a series of collapsing walls. Something made me keep it instead, some instinct telling me that avoiding a doctor's office would not make any of this less true.The clinic felt too bright and too ordinary for what I was walking in carrying, magazines fanned neatly across a coffee table, a fish tank bubbling quietly in the corner, other women in the waiting room chatting easily about names and nurseries as though pregnancy were a simple, uncomplicated joy rather than the tangled question currently sitting in my chest, heavy

  • Anna and Jonathan: The Arranged Marriage    CHAPTER 66

    ANNA'S POVI noticed the date on the calendar three days before I let myself fully acknowledge what it meant, glancing at it each morning while making coffee and quickly redirecting my attention elsewhere, as though avoiding the thought long enough might somehow undo the calculation running quietly in the back of my mind.The calendar itself hung in the kitchen, an ordinary household fixture I had walked past a thousand times without any particular significance attached to it, and yet those three mornings it seemed to demand attention in a way it never had before, the small printed numbers refusing to let my eyes slide past them the way they usually did, insisting instead on being counted and recounted until the truth of them could no longer be avoided.I was late. Not by a day or two, which happened occasionally and meant nothing, but by nearly two weeks, an irregularity my body had never produced before without clear explanation. I told myself it was stress, grief, the sheer physica

  • Anna and Jonathan: The Arranged Marriage    CHAPTER 65

    JONATHAN'S POVI found the box of old photographs by accident, searching through a closet in my study for a contract I had misplaced weeks earlier, and once I found it, I could not make myself put it away again.The box itself was unremarkable, plain cardboard gone soft at the corners, the kind of thing easily forgotten in the back of a closet for years at a time. I nearly closed the lid without looking inside at all, distracted by the contract I still needed to locate, before something made me pause and lift the first photograph out instead.Lucas and I at fourteen, grinning at the camera with matching black eyes after a rugby match that had gone badly for both of us. Lucas and I at nineteen, standing awkwardly in ill fitting suits at my father's insistence, the two of us clearly more interested in whatever joke had just passed between us than the formal portrait we were supposed to be taking seriously. Lucas at my side during every difficult season of my adult life, my father's hear

  • Anna and Jonathan: The Arranged Marriage    CHAPTER 64

    ANNA'S POVThe house felt larger in the days after the funeral, its rooms stretching into distances that had never seemed so vast before, though nothing about its physical dimensions had actually changed. Jonathan and I moved through it separately, our paths crossing at meals and in hallways, neither of us quite finding the words to follow through on whatever admission had passed between us in the car outside the cemetery.I noticed small things during those quiet days, the particular way sound traveled differently through empty rooms, how the garden looked different now that I could no longer walk through it without thinking of Lucas, how even Jonathan's study, once a place I rarely entered, had started to feel like the only room in the house that still contained something honest.I found myself avoiding certain hallways entirely, certain rooms, as though grief had redrawn the map of a house I had lived in for over a year, marking territories now too painful to cross without warning.

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    ANNA'S POVThe funeral drew more cameras than I expected, given how carefully Jonathan's family usually managed the boundary between private grief and public spectacle. Lucas's family had insisted on a public service, unwilling to let the murder be reduced to a quiet, hushed affair, and I understood their reasoning even as I dreaded what it meant for the day ahead.The morning had arrived gray and cold, fitting weather for what waited ahead, and I had stood at my bedroom window for a long while before dressing, watching the clouds gather over the estate grounds and wondering how a sky could look so ordinary on a day that would forever mark itself apart from every other day in my life.I stood beside Jonathan in the front row, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, both of us dressed in the careful black the occasion demanded, and I felt the weight of dozens of eyes settling on us the moment we took our seats. The press had gathered at a respectful distance, though respectful

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    ANNA'S POVI do not remember dropping the phone, only the sound of it hitting the floor somewhere near my feet, Jonathan's voice still audible and distant, saying my name over and over as though repetition alone might keep me tethered to the moment.Lucas was dead.The words refused to arrange themselves into anything I could fully absorb, sitting instead like foreign objects lodged somewhere in my chest, present but unprocessed. I stared at the phone on the floor, its small screen still lit, Jonathan's voice growing more frantic through the tiny speaker, and some distant part of my mind noted the strangeness of grief announcing itself through something as ordinary as a cracked phone case.I do not know how long I sat there on the edge of my bed before I finally retrieved the phone and managed something resembling coherent speech, promising Jonathan I would come to the hospital, that I understood, that I was somehow still functioning despite every part of me insisting otherwise.The d

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    I woke up with a start as the alarm clock beside me blared out its harsh sound. With an annoyed grimace, I stabbed hard on the alarm clock and silenced it."How the fuck do you still work?" I asked confused as I stared at the old alarm clock I had used as a kid."God damnit." I cursed again when it

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    ANNA'S POV"Mom, Dad I am home!" I announced as I took the stairs two at a time. In no time, I arrived at the top of the stairs leading to my parent's room."Mom Dad!" I called out again feeling so excited to be meeting my parents after almost six months. There was so much excitement in me that I

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