ホーム / Romance / The Bride They Buried Alive / Chapter 17: Names You Don’t Say Out Loud

共有

Chapter 17: Names You Don’t Say Out Loud

作者: Eli_Roy
last update 公開日: 2026-04-28 18:51:35
The lab was called Meridian Diagnostics.

I found it on the second search, buried beneath the larger referral networks. Independent. Private. No institutional affiliations listed on their website. A contact form and a postal address in the city and a line at the bottom of the page that said all submissions were handled under strict confidentiality.

I didn't use the contact form.

I found the name of the lead analyst instead. A woman. Dr. Reeves. She had published three papers in the last fou
この本を無料で読み続ける
コードをスキャンしてアプリをダウンロード
ロックされたチャプター

最新チャプター

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    Chapter 73: The Gate

    She found the photograph in October. Not looking for it. She had been going through the last of the boxes from the east wing, the ones that had held the final operational materials before Damien cleared everything out, most of which were empty now or held things that belonged somewhere else in the house. She had been doing this slowly, over several Saturdays, in the particular unhurried way she did most things now that unhurried was an option. The photograph was at the bottom of the last box. She sat down on the floor of the east wing with it. It was the same photograph. The one she had moved from the corkboard in those first urgent weeks. The boat. The photograph she had put in the 2019 accounts folder and which had ended up in the legal documentation and which she had assumed was gone into the machinery of the proceedings. But here it was. Someone had put it back. She didn't know when. She didn't know who. She looked at it for a long time. A boat on grey water. Edward Blackth

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    Chapter 72: The Coffee Meeting

    Harlan was already there when she arrived. He was sitting at a corner table in a café six minutes from the Meridian, which she suspected was not a coincidence, which she had decided not to mention. He had a cup in front of him that he had not touched. He was looking at the door when she came through it. He stood up. She had not expected that. The standing. It was such a specific gesture, old-fashioned, slightly formal, the gesture of a man who had thought about this moment and had decided to meet it with a certain quality of attention. She crossed the room and sat down across from him and he sat back down and they looked at each other for a moment across the small table. He was older than she had built him in her mind from the phone calls. The careful voice had suggested someone contained and precise. He was that, but also more worn than she had expected. The specific wearing of someone who had spent a long time being careful. She understood that. "You look like your mother," h

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    CHAPTER 71: Actually Mine

    Spring came to the estate without announcement.She noticed it the way she noticed most things now, not as information to be filed and acted on but simply as fact. The hedge line filling in. The beds Damien had replanted in autumn coming through in colours she hadn't anticipated. Yellow, mostly. She hadn't known they would be yellow.She was in the garden at seven in the morning with coffee and no particular reason to be there except that she wanted to be and it was warm enough now that wanting to be outside at seven in the morning was something she could act on without calculating the cost of it first.That was still new. Six months in and still new.She heard the door behind her.Damien came out and stood beside her and looked at the garden and said nothing for a while."Yellow," she said."Mrs. Hale chose them," he said. "She said you'd like yellow."She looked at the beds. She did like yellow. She hadn't known that about herself before this garden."She was right," she said.He ha

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    CHAPTER 70: Which Time

    It was a Sunday in December.No particular significance to the date. No hearing, no legal appointment, no board meeting, no journalist, no message from Harlan or Edmund or the Meridian or anyone requiring anything from her specifically. Just a Sunday, which had become something she was still learning how to inhabit without automatically converting it into a task list.She was in the library. Book open, actually reading it. The fire was on, which was Edmund's doing. He had started lighting it on Sunday mornings without being asked, sometime in November, and she had not commented on it and neither had Damien and the three of them had arrived at a silent agreement that Sunday mornings in the library involved a fire, which was the kind of agreement she was learning to recognise as the texture of a household rather than a transaction.She was getting better at recognising those.Damien was somewhere in the house. She could hear him moving through rooms with the specific unhurried quality h

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    CHAPTER 69: What Ordinary Feels Like

    Three weeks after the board meeting the cameras came down.Not all of them. The gate camera stayed, Damien said that was practical rather than surveillance and she agreed. The exterior perimeter cameras stayed because the estate was large and they were useful. But the interior ones came down. The east corridor camera with its forty-second loop that she had counted and recounted in her first two weeks. The one above the third door. The one at the corner of the east wing she had watched make its small rotation from the library window for months.She stood in the east corridor the morning after and looked at the empty bracket where the third-door camera had been.It felt strange. She had been measuring her movements against that loop for so long that its absence created a kind of phantom awareness. She still clocked forty seconds in her head when she passed that point. Her body had learned the rhythm and wasn't ready to stop.She mentioned it to Damien at breakfast."I keep counting," sh

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    CHAPTER 68: The Room Adjusts

    The board meeting was on a Friday.She wore the grey dress. Not the invisible one, not the constructed one. The one that was simply hers, that she had bought three weeks after Victor left the estate because she had walked past a shop window and liked it and had not thought about whether it was appropriate or strategic or whether it would draw the right kind of attention or any of the calculations that had governed her wardrobe for years.She had just walked in and bought it.Small things. She was still noticing which decisions came without the old machinery attached to them and which ones still required work.Damien had asked her to come and she had said yes and they had not discussed what her role would be in the room because her role in the room was simply to be there, which was a different thing from any role she had played in any room for the entirety of the time she had been inside this marriage. She was not there to be managed or to manage. She was there because she was Lila Bla

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    Chapter 13: The First Lie Was Official

    I read the note three times. Then I folded it back exactly the way it had come and held it in my closed fist for a long moment. Don't trust the doctor. Four words. No explanation. No context. Just the warning and his handwriting and the sound of wheels already gone down the corridor. I sat o

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    Chapter 12: Don’t Trust the Doctor

    I locked the door. Then I stood with my back against it. Old houses make noise... this one made less than it should have. Or I just wasn't hearing it. I thought about the tissue in the drawer. Damien's voice through the door. The four steps between me and the dresser where I'd left the swab. I

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    Chapter 11: Not Because of Me

    I didn't open the door. Not immediately. I stood there and waited. Three seconds. Four. I counted without meaning to, which is a strange thing to do. The handle was cold. The whole room was, actually... that kind of cold that comes in after midnight when you stop moving. Then I opened it.

  • The Bride They Buried Alive    Chapter 8: The Plan Was Older Than Me

    I lay on top of the covers fully dressed, the programme on the pillow beside me, staring at the ceiling until the light outside turned white. The circle in ink kept pulling my eyes back to it. Clean. Deliberate. At some point footsteps passed in the corridor. Slow. They stopped outside my door

続きを読む
無料で面白い小説を探して読んでみましょう
GoodNovel アプリで人気小説に無料で!お好きな本をダウンロードして、いつでもどこでも読みましょう!
アプリで無料で本を読む
コードをスキャンしてアプリで読む
DMCA.com Protection Status