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Chapter ~ Six
publish date:
2026-10-20 17:25:56
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Divorcing Him Before Christmas Chapter ~ Six
LIORA “Liora?” My hands stayed under the cold water. Nobody ever had to ask whether I was Liora. It was the one thing about me that had never been in doubt. My mother said it at every opportunity she got. But no one had ever said it like that. As if they were not sure. I knew that voice. And I knew it couldn’t be. The boy who owned that voice had walked out of my life twelve years ago, the year I turned eighteen, and he had not come back. I had stopped searching for him long before I stopped believing he’d call. Now, at the end of what I could call the worst morning of my life, standing in a hotel restroom with my wrists going numb, I was hearing ghosts. ‘You are imagining things,’ I told myself. I turned off the tap and turned around, slowly, water running down my forearms. A young woman had come out of the last stall, in a red dress, with her hair twisted up and a clutch tucked under her arm. She was crossing toward the sinks and, by chance, standing squarely between me an
Divorcing Him Before Christmas Chapter ~ Five
LIORAI had meant to wait. I had promised myself thirty days. I had not promised myself a morning like this one.He did not laugh. He did not say I was being unreasonable like I expected. He went very still, and then, to my surprise, he looked around the room first, at the waiter, the next table, the door, as though checking for witnesses.“Not now,” he said quietly.“Not now?”“I was going to talk to you myself,” he said, almost to himself. “After the holidays. Properly, with everything arranged.” He caught himself, and set his jaw. “Seraphine is home through the holidays. It’s a delicate time, Liora. There would be talk. People would say the marriage ended the moment she landed, and I won’t do that to her.”To her.So that was the sentence from the drawer. A timetable to end everything we shared. Somewhere inside me, the last thing that had been listening for an apology went quiet.“We’ve been together for five years,” he went on, reasonable, almost tender, and reached across the l
Divorcing Him Before Christmas Chapter ~ Four
LIORAI let the fifth call ring itself out too.His name sat there on the screen, and I watched it disappear back into black without answering. I silenced it, and put it face-down on the script stand, and read.I read the first passage Lisbon had asked for, and then the second, and somewhere in the third I stopped bracing for my voice to crack. Something in me had been pressed flat for five years. It came up all at once.When I opened my eyes the engineer was standing very still behind the glass.“Play it back,” I said.He did. I stood with the headphones pulled half off and listened to a woman I barely recognized read a line about a tide that never came back. There was weight in it, a low, dark grain that had not been there at twenty-two. I used to read the news like I expected the world to be kind. This woman read like she already knew otherwise.“Your voice has bulked up,” the engineer said, through the intercom. “Since the last time you were in here.”I let myself believe him. Jus
Divorcing Him Before Christmas Chapter ~ Three
LIORAIt takes less than a second to learn where a man keeps his heart. It is wherever his eyes go first.Dorian’s went to her.I don’t think anyone else in the hall noticed. They were too busy swallowing their laughter and pretending it had never been there. But I noticed, because I had spent five years training myself to notice the exact things about my husband that I was not supposed to.Seraphine recovered first, or rather, she began to perform recovering.She rose with one hand at her throat and her eyes already wet, and she did not come toward me. She stepped sideways, into the curve of Dorian’s arm, as though I were the thing in the room that might bite.“Liora,” she breathed. “Oh, Liora, I had no idea you would… I’m so sorry. We weren’t…” She let the sentence fall apart on purpose, prettily, and looked up at him. “Dorian, I should go.”“You’re not going anywhere.” He said it to her, with his whole body turned to her, before he said one word to me.I felt that land somewhere un
Divorcing Him Before Christmas Chapter ~ Two
LIORA“Sera.”I tried the name aloud once, in the empty study, just to hear how it sounded in a voice like mine.Five years, and Dorian had never given me a nickname. He used my full government name, carefully, like something he was afraid of scuffing. And I could not stop seeing his face in that doorway: the laugh, and then the switch, the second the light went out of it.I went down to the kitchen and made coffee.“What do I make for dinner tonight, ma’am?” Greta asked, a dish towel over one shoulder. “I could make—”“He likes the—” I started, out of five years of habit, before I caught myself.“He won’t be home for dinner,” she said gently, as if she were the one delivering the news. Which in every proper sense should have been the other way around.“I know.” I nodded.I opened my laptop at the kitchen island and read the Lisbon email one more time. Then I printed the acceptance letter and signed it, in ink. The consulate wanted it delivered in person before the end of the week. My
Divorcing Him Before Christmas Chapter ~ One
LIORA“One more Christmas without you in my arms. I am doing my best to endure.”The lines sat near the bottom of the page, in my husband’s handwriting.I froze.The paper was thick and cream, and it had gone soft along its folds. At the top was a date in the neat, slanted figures he used for contracts. Eight days ago.The watch box slid from my fingers and landed on the carpet without a sound.That was Dorian’s hand. And that was not a letter to me.For a moment, I couldn’t move. The clock on his bookshelf ticked. Blood rushed in my ears, and heat climbed painfully into my face.Above the lines was her name. Seraphine. I wasn’t sure if it was dust that had flown into my eyes but it blinked even faster and my eyes felt wet.Endure. That was the word he had chosen for the five years he had spent beside me.On our FIFTH wedding anniversary, the fourteenth of December. I sat on the floor of my husband’s study and learned that he had been writing to another woman since the morning I beca
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