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Chapter 93
publish date:
2026-08-15 17:28:19
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Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle Chapter 99
WHAT ROBERTA KNOWSLUCIEN'S POVAt two years and eleven months, Roberta knows: the names of all the parts of the maple tree she can reach. The sound her mother's pen makes on the legal pad and the difference between the sound of working writing and thinking writing. The three books she allows at bedtime and the specific order in which they must be read. That the stone in her pocket goes everywhere. That Grandad Robert lived in books, which is what Elena has told her and which Roberta has absorbed with the literalness of someone for whom books are already significant objects.She knows that Aunt Clara lives in Islington now and comes on Sundays and that Daniel comes with her and that Lily sometimes comes too and that this is the correct and permanent arrangement of those people. She knows that Ethan is the one who tells her true things when she asks true questions, which she has identified through several months of testing. She knows that Sophia is in New York and calls on Sundays and
Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle Chapter 98
CLARA'S WEDDINGELENA'S POVClara and Daniel marry on a Saturday in August, in a registry office in Islington, with fourteen people present.Small is Clara's choice and Clara's alone, made with the specific authority of someone who understands that the wedding is about the marriage and not about the event, and that the right size for a registry office ceremony is the size that fits the room and the people who belong in it.I am seven months pregnant and standing straight and present, because there is nowhere I would rather be and nothing short of active labour that would keep me from it.Roberta is in a navy dress that she agreed to wear after a negotiation that lasted three days, the primary sticking point being that the dress did not have pockets. Clara solved this by having a small pocket sewn into the lining, which Roberta tested on the morning of the wedding by placing her stone in it and confirmed as satisfactory.The ceremony is eighteen minutes, the registrar reads the legal p
Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle Chapter 97
WHAT THE FAMILY ISLUCIEN'S POVSunday dinner in June is larger than usual — Clara and Daniel, Ethan and Priya, Gerald and his wife, Sophia who is visiting for two weeks, and the specific warmth of a table around which people who have earned their places are gathered.Roberta moves through the evening with the practiced ease of someone who knows everyone at the table and has specific, differentiated relationships with each of them. She shows Sophia the stone — Sophia receives it with the appropriate gravity. She takes Priya's hand and leads her to the maple, which she has been doing with all new people for eight months and which Priya accepts without commentary, which Ethan notes with the expression of someone in possession of confirming evidence.She ends up in Gerald's wife's lap after dinner, which is where she ends up most Sundays, apparently finding there the specific combination of softness and attentiveness that she finds most conducive to the end of the evening.I look at the
Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle Chapter 96
THE NEW THINGELENA'S POVI find out on a Tuesday in April, and I tell Lucien on Wednesday evening after Roberta is in bed.He is at the kitchen table with the board papers when I come downstairs. He looks up, he reads my face in the immediate way he reads my face now — not the social reading of a person who has known you a short time, but the accurate reading of someone who has been paying attention for three years."Tell me," he says."I'm pregnant," I say.He puts the papers down. He looks at me with the full weight of his attention."Not planned," I say. "But not —" I pause. "I don't have a word for what it is, other than real. It's very real and I've been sitting with it for twenty-four hours and I needed to tell you before I could decide what I think about it.""What do you think about it?" he asks."I think it's good," I say. "I think Roberta having a sibling is good, and I think the timing is complicated but manageable, and I think —" I stop. "I think my father would have been
Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle Chapter 95
"Three years today," she says, over coffee."Yes," I say."You offered me the contract," she says. "I asked for time to read it. You gave me the full copy and sat across the table while I read.""You read the whole thing," I say. "Every clause.""I always read the whole thing," she says.We drink our coffee, Roberta is in the garden with Mrs. Chen, the Saturday morning investigation already underway. Clara and Daniel are in Islington, the house is warm and the March light is starting to carry the first suggestion of the season turning."What would you have done," I ask, "if I had been someone else? Someone who made the same offer for the same practical reasons but was not — what I was."She considers this with the seriousness she brings to hypotheticals that are actually real questions in disguise. "I would have taken the contract," she says. "The practical situation required it. But I would not have —" She pauses. "It would have been a transaction. Functional and finite. I would have
Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle Chapter 94
THE PATTERN PUBLISHESELENA'S POVThe Pattern is published on a Thursday in February, in the third year of the PhD and three years and four months after my father's documentation was used to dismantle the structure that killed him.The publication is different from the first book's. The first book was personal — a story told from the inside. This one is both personal and institutional, which means its reception involves different audiences moving at different speeds. The academic reception has already begun, through the peer-reviewed chapter and two conference presentations Professor Marsh arranged. The policy reception will take longer, because institutional change requires institutional time. The general reception is the one that is least predictable.The launch event is at the publisher's offices. Not a gala — a conversation, moderated by Professor Marsh, between me and the head of the national domestic abuse advisory board, who has been working with Clara's foundation on the liter
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