LOGINBella pov A few hours later we were in the kitchen because Ruth had stocked the kitchen and neither of us had any particular reason to go anywhere and cooking had become one of the small domestic things we'd discovered we were good at together.I was doing something with tomatoes when he came up behind me and slid both arms around my waist and pressed his mouth to my neck, warm and deliberate.I tipped my head and felt the familiar pull of it and then said, “Caleb.”“Mm.”“We just had sex.”Four hours ago,” he said, against my neck.“That’s recent.”“It’s really not.”“I’m cooking.”“The tomatoes can wait,” he said, and I could feel him smiling against my skin.“Let me finish this,” I said, “and then we can discuss your timeline.”He pressed one more kiss below my ear — and stepped back. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll open the wine.”He set a glass beside me and I looked at it and felt my stomach do the small quiet thing due to the smell of the wine, I picked it up and took a sip and put it
Bella POVI woke up at six and lay still for a moment, waiting. The nausea arrived on schedule low and unhelpful, sitting somewhere between my stomach and my throat, the same way it had arrived every morning for the past few weeks. I breathed through it the way I'd been breathing through it, and after a few minutes it retreated enough to be manageable.Caleb was still asleep, one arm across my waist, his breathing slow and even. I looked at his face in the early light — the particular quiet of him asleep, and felt the warmth of the morning and decided that nausea was not going to be the thing I focused on today.I got up carefully and went to make tea.By nine we were on the beach.It was the kind of morning that felt designed — water so clear you could see the bottom twenty feet out, the heat already building but not yet unreasonable, the beach entirely ours in every direction. Caleb had brought the good towels and a bag with water and fruit and a book he hadn't opened in days becau
Caleb POV The island had no name on any map I'd found. That had been the point. The property manager — a compact, efficient woman named Ruth who had met us at the dock with two cold drinks and a brief orientation had described it as "private enough that the word private becomes redundant," and she had not been exaggerating. Three acres of it, a low white house open on two sides to the sea, no staff on site after six in the evening. No photographers who knew where we were and no phones that needed answering. Tom was with Diana and Maya in Silverton, in the house, under Lena's oversight and the care of two people who had each, in their different ways, become essential. Before we'd left he had clung to me for approximately thirty seconds at the door, then spotted Maya's bag and asked if she'd brought the card game she'd promised, and released me completely. Bella had watched this from beside me with a small, fond expression that she'd tried to make neutral and failed. "He's fine," I
Bella POVThe guests were gone by nine, the evening had been long and warm, dinner stretched past sunset, the garden lights doing exactly what I'd hoped, Tom falling asleep against Diana's shoulder sometime around eight with the ring pillow still clutched to his chest. Maya had taken him up as Diana had stayed long enough to help stack chairs and then said goodnight.By nine it was just us, in the quiet of the house, with the lights still strung in the garden and the last of the wine on the kitchen counter and nothing left between us and the fact that we were, actually and finally, alone.Caleb was in the kitchen when I came back downstairs from checking on Tom. He'd taken off his jacket and loosened his tie and was leaning against the counter with a glass of water, and he looked up when he heard me on the stairs, and something in the way he looked at me — the same way he'd looked at me when I'd walked down the garden path, unhurried and complete — made me stop on the bottom step."He
Bella pov Maya met my eyes in the mirror. I pointed at her, she pressed her lips together and went back to my hair without a word.By the time Maya zipped my dress it was eleven-fifteen and the house had settled into a quieter kind of energy — the guests had gone ahead, Priya and Adaeze had left with hugs and lipstick and genuine warmth, and it was just Maya and Diana and Tom and me in the upstairs bedroom.Maya stepped back when she was done and I turned to the mirror.She pressed her lips together in exactly the way she'd promised she wouldn't."You said no face," I said."I'm not doing a face.""Maya.""I'm not," she said, her voice perfectly level and her eyes doing something else entirely. "You just look like you. That's all, the right version of you." She reached out and straightened something at my shoulder that didn't need straightening. "He's going to fall apart.""He doesn't fall apart," I said."He cried at Tom's school play," Diana said, from the corner, without looking u
Bella POVI woke up before my alarm.Six o'clock had been the plan. My body decided five-forty-seven was close enough and that was the end of sleep. I lay there in the quiet for a moment, taking stock — heart rate elevated but not panicked, the fear I'd been half-expecting nowhere to be found. Just the still, certain feeling of a day that had been coming for a long time finally arriving.From down the hall came the sounds of several women who had drunk too much and slept too little attempting to be functional. Something dropped. Someone said ow. Someone else said shhhh in a voice that was louder than whatever it was shushing.I smiled at the ceiling.Maya appeared in my doorway approximately minutes later in last night's makeup and the robe she'd produced from nowhere, her hair in a state that suggested the dancing had ended up being vigorous and prolonged."You're awake," she said."I've been awake.""How long?""Thirteen minutes."She came and sat on the edge of the bed and looked a
walked away before she could respond, my composure intact but my heart racing. Victoria Lane and Caleb. Of course. A beautiful socialite with connections and no moral compass, exactly his type. Not that I cared. I absolutely did not care."Bella." Ethan appeared at my elbow, his timing impeccable a
Caleb POVI watched Bella walk away from me on that dance floor, her spine straight and her head high, and felt like I was drowning, years of searching, years of guilt and regret, and when I finally found her, she looked at me like I was poison.I deserved that look, infact i deserved worse. But Go
Bella pov I tucked Tom into bed and sat beside him, smoothing his dark hair back from his forehead. "I love you, Tom. More than anything in the whole world.""Love you too, Mommy." His eyes opened slightly, that grey gaze so like his father's that it hurt. "Mommy? Why do I look different from you?
Bella POVI made it back to the penthouse before I fell apart completely. The elevator doors had barely closed before the first sob broke free, raw and ugly and years overdue. I pressed my back against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on the floor, my expensive suit wrinkling, my carefull







