Library
Search
Home / Romance / Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle / Chapter 14

Share

Chapter 14

Author: Tesslane
last update publish date: 2026-07-07 18:00:43

Daniel's team traced the photograph within thirty-six hours, working the problem with the same methodical patience Wren had watched him bring to everything else since the night he'd first been introduced to her in the front hall as though she were nothing more than a name on a schedule. The message had bounced through two anonymizing services before landing, but the studio break-in itself had been caught, imperfectly, by a security camera belonging to the bakery next door — grainy footage, a si
Continue to read this book for free
Scan code to download App
Previous Chapter Next Chapter
Locked Chapter

Latest chapter

  • Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle    Chapter 63

    THE SECOND BOOKLUCIEN'S POVElena begins the second book in March.I know this because the legal pads multiply. The first book required three legal pads and produced two hundred and sixty pages of finished manuscript. The second is already on its fourth pad and is, by Elena's description, still in the architecture phase — the mapping of an argument that is more complex than the first book's because it is not a personal account but an analytical one, requiring a different kind of rigor and a different relationship to the material.The first book was about her father. The second is about the system that failed him and the thousands of people in comparable situations who do not have a daughter willing to spend two years dismantling the mechanism that buried them.She tells me about it in the way she tells me about the PhD research — not with a need for response but with the specific usefulness of speaking an argument out loud to someone who will notice when it holds and when it doesn't.

  • Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle    Chapter 62

    CLARA'S MORNINGELENA'S POVClara comes home from the foundation on a Tuesday in February with a quality I have not seen in her before. It is subtle enough that I might not have noticed it in the early months of her living with us — but I know Clara well now, the specific textures of her moods, the way she carries different kinds of days in her posture and her hands, and the quality she brings through the door tonight is none of the ones I recognize.It is not the brightness of a productive day, which I know. Not the tiredness of a demanding one. It is something less easily named — a particular aliveness that she is clearly trying not to perform, the look of someone who is in possession of something they are not ready to share and is aware of how visible that possession is.I make no comment. I give her dinner. I ask about the program's third pilot cohort, which began this week. She tells me about it with her usual careful detail. We talk about Ethan's first month in the CRO role, whi

  • Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle    Chapter 61

    ROBERTA WALKSLUCIEN'S POVShe has been walking for two months, this is not the event I am writing about.What I am writing about is the afternoon in February when she walks across the garden to me.It is a Saturday, the garden is cold and clear with the specific sharp quality of February light that makes everything look more itself than it does in softer seasons. Elena is inside at her desk. Clara is at the foundation. I am in the garden doing the work the garden requires in February — which is less than other months but still present, the clearing and the cutting back that makes way for what comes next.Roberta has been on the paved section near the garden door, which is the territory she is allowed to occupy unsupervised because it is flat and bounded. She has been there for twenty minutes, examining the specific properties of a small stone she found last week and has been returning to with the consistency of ongoing research.I am at the far end of the garden, near the beds. I he

  • Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle    Chapter 60

    THE PHDELENA'S POVThe first seminar is on a Thursday morning in January, and I arrive seven minutes early, which is eight minutes later than I intended.The room is on the third floor of a building that smells of old books and institutional coffee — the specific combination I remember from my first degree, which I associate with the particular mixture of apprehension and readiness that attends being in a room full of people who are serious about an idea. There are nine other students in the doctoral program's foundational seminar, ranging from a man who appears to be in his late twenties and who has the composed confidence of someone who has come directly from a successful career in law, to a woman in her fifties who has the particular alert quality of someone returning to education after a long practical life. I fit somewhere in the middle, in age and experience, which is exactly where I expected to be.The seminar leader is a professor whose published work I have been reading for

  • Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle    Chapter 59

    ETHAN'S DECISIONLUCIEN'S POVEthan calls in November and asks if there is a role for him.He says it directly, which is the version of Ethan I have come to know over the past year — the one who has been doing his own accounting and who has, in the process, shed the careful self-preserving indirection that characterised every conversation we had before. The old Ethan would have approached this obliquely, through several conversational passes, testing the temperature before naming what he wanted. The new one says: Is there a role for me."What kind of role?" I ask."Useful," he says. "I've been watching the company from the outside for ten months. I've watched the board restructure and the foundation rebuild and the audit change the internal culture in ways I wouldn't have predicted. And I've been sitting in my own company doing work that is competent and entirely without meaning, and I've run out of patience for it."I consider this. Ethan's professional background is in risk assessme

  • Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle    Chapter 58

    THE APPEAL'S ENDELENA'S POVGerald calls on a Wednesday in November to tell me that Margaret's appeal has been dismissed on both grounds.The procedural argument — the due process irregularity in her Heathrow detention — was rejected by the appellate panel in a written finding that Gerald describes as unambiguous. The chain-of-custody challenge to the DNA evidence was dismissed with similar clarity, the panel noting that the documentation of the sample's handling from collection through analysis was, in their words, exemplary."The concealment charge stands," Gerald says. "All four charges stand. The sentence stands, this is the end of the appellate process, Elena. Barring an extraordinary application to a higher court, which Margaret's lawyers have not indicated and which the grounds do not support, the proceedings against her are concluded."I am in the study. November rain on the window. Roberta with Mrs. Chen downstairs, the sound of them audible through the floor in the specific

More Chapters

You may also like

Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on GoodNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP
DMCA.com Protection Status