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Chapter Sixty Five
publish date:
2026-10-11 18:56:33
Latest chapter
Married to my Fiancé Uncle Chapter Ninety Seven
ELENA POVI knew something was wrong the moment I came through the front door that evening and heard nothing. No piano. No clatter from the kitchen, no argument over homework conducted at full volume from the stairs. The house had the particular stillness of a held breath.I found Carolina in the library, curled in the armchair by the cold fireplace with her knees drawn up and her phone in her hand, white earbuds in both ears. She had just turned fourteen. She was all elbows and sharp, watchful dark eyes, and a mind that moved so quickly it sometimes left the rest of us trailing behind.She did not look up when I came in."Caro?"She took out one earbud, slowly. "Mama. Did you know there's a podcast about us?"My stomach did a slow, cold turn. "What kind of podcast?""True crime." She held out the phone, and I took it and saw a slick black cover image of the harbor at night, with the name of our city picked out in red letters, and beneath it, in stark white type, SHADOW BAY: THE R
Married to my Fiancé Uncle Chapter Ninety Six
ELENA POVEvery year, on the same evening in autumn, we held a dinner at the estate to mark the day Damien came home. It began as a quiet thing, in the early years, a table of perhaps twenty people who had stood beside us through the worst of it. It grew, as everything we touched seemed to, into something larger and more cheerful, a long, loud, laughing evening that filled the great dining hall to its rafters. Damien called it the anniversary of the day I slapped him in a lobby. I called it the anniversary of the day I stopped waiting.This year, I was late.It was not my fault, entirely. A shipment of fabric had been held at customs in Milan, and a buyer from Tokyo had arrived two days early, and Marianne had lost a front tooth that afternoon and would not be consoled until the tooth fairy had been properly interviewed. By the time I came up the stairs of the east wing to dress, the sounds of the party were already drifting through the old house, the clink of glasses, a swell of
Married to my Fiancé Uncle Chapter Ninety Five
ELENA POVMarco Reyes retired from the police department in November after twenty-two years on the force, and the department threw him a party that he spent the first hour trying to escape. They held it in the banquet room of a dull hotel near the courthouse, with a sheet cake, a banner, and a slideshow set to music that made even the stoic old sergeants dab at their eyes. I watched him standing near the exit in his dress uniform, rigid as a coat rack, accepting handshakes with a faint, hunted look, and I thought that he had never looked so ill at ease in all the years I had known him."He hates this," Priya murmured at my elbow."He'll survive it.""I told him if he left before the cake, I'd hold it against him for the rest of his life." She smiled, and I noticed, not for the first time, the faint, new softness in her face when she looked in his direction.I had suspected it for a while. It had started, I thought, at the gender reveal for Marianne, when I had found the two of them
Married to my Fiancé Uncle Chapter Ninety Four
ELENA POVI had not seen my stepmother in twelve years, since the evening the news broke that she had been led from my father's office in handcuffs. She had written to me once, early on, a single stiff page in her cramped, controlled hand, asking for nothing, and I had not answered. I had told myself that silence was a kind of mercy, for both of us.It was Sophia's birthday that made me change my mind. I had gone to the cemetery in the first week of October, as I did every year, with a small bunch of yellow roses for the grave at the far end of the family plot, and I had found a second bunch already there, wilted, tied with a prison-issue rubber band. Someone had arranged for it to be delivered. I stood in the cold wind for a long time, turning the dead flowers over in my hands, and I understood that I could not go on carrying this alone.The prison was a gray concrete complex two hours inland, ringed with wire, surrounded by flat brown fields. The visiting room smelled of floor
Married to my Fiancé Uncle Chapter Ninety Three
ELENA POVThe letter came in a plain envelope with a foreign stamp and a return address I did not recognize. The handwriting, though, I knew at once. It was the sharp, upright script I had last seen on the engraved invitation to a dinner where she had stood up and announced a lie.I read it twice at my desk in the studio, with the afternoon light slanting across the worktable, and then I sat for a long time with the page in my hands before I carried it home to Damien.Emily Moretti wrote with her customary precision, and with none of her old polish. She was living in a small seaside town two hundred miles up the coast. Her father had died the winter before. The family had lost nearly everything in the years after the scandal, and she had spent a decade rebuilding herself as a bookkeeper for a fishing cooperative, which she described, with a flash of the old dry humor, as the most humbling arithmetic of her life. She had a son. He was thirteen. His name was Adrian.I am not asking
Married to my Fiancé Uncle Chapter Ninety Two
ELENA POVThe demolition took eleven days, and Damien insisted on watching the first one. He stood on the pavement across the street from the third club in the gray light of early morning, hands in the pockets of his coat, while the machine rolled up and a chain swung slowly against the old brick facade. I stood beside him. Neither of us spoke. When the first wall came down in a long, slow, shuddering roar of dust, he let out a breath I felt through my entire arm."It's only a building," I said."I know." He did not look away. "It's strange, though. I was nineteen the first time I walked through that door. I thought it was the most important room in the world."By the end of the second week, there was nothing left but a wide rectangle of churned earth, fenced off with chain link and strung with bright orange tape. Priya's cousin, a soil scientist, took samples and pronounced the ground astonishingly sound, except for some dubious pipes, which they removed. The foundation bought t
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