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Chapter 82
publish date:
2026-10-29 22:03:21Isla POV
Priya had printed the thread in a large font, which was how I knew it was bad. She taped the pages end to end in a long accordion down the middle of her desk that Saturday morning, and she stood over it with her coffee as though it might still turn into something harmless if she waited."Exhibit F," she said. "Filed at four fifty-nine yesterday, right behind the witness list, the way you slide a bill under a door. Four months of texts between you and Nora."
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The Other Mrs. Cross Chapter 93
Isla POVThe sign painter was a stooped man named Ottis who arrived with a ladder, a rag, and a coffee can full of brushes, and he didn't say a word until the first letter was on the glass. Then he stepped back with his head tilted and asked whether I wanted the ‘I’ plain or fancy."Is there a fancy?""Some people like a flourish." He waved a brush at the wet R. "Most go plain. Easier to read from a car.""Could you put a small hook at the top of the I, curled to the left, the way a person writes it by hand?"He looked at me over his glasses. "Nobody asks for that.""A teacher in fourth grade said it looked confident.""Did it?""I never found out. I just kept doing it."Ottis shrugged and bent to his can, and by ten the window read ISLA RENWICK in black capitals with gold edging, ARCHITECTURE & DESIGN beneath it in smaller type, and at the top of the ‘I’ a tiny curl that nobody would see unless they went looking. I stood on the sidewalk with my arms folded while a bus went past, and
The Other Mrs. Cross Chapter 92
Isla POVDorian was the first to move, which I would have admired more if he hadn't done it by taking two long steps backward and colliding with the cracked column. It made a dull, definite sound. Mabel watched him rub his shoulder with the flat, unhurried interest she usually gave to nature programs."Are you okay?""Perfectly. I was checking the column.""With your back?""It's structural. You have to test it from every angle.""Mom said it doesn't hold anything up."I put a hand over my mouth, and from the doorway Camille said "I'm so sorry" in the tone of a woman arriving at a minor fire, red-faced and breathless, her tote bag sliding down her arm. "She read the sticky note on your fridge. Alder Street. I said we would go home and she said she's eight, not blind, and then she lay down on the sidewalk.""I didn't lie down," Mabel said. "I sat strategically.""She sat strategically for four minutes. A
The Other Mrs. Cross Chapter 91
Isla POVI got down off the table because my body needed somewhere to go, and I walked the length of the print shop with the long tape in my hand before I trusted myself to say anything at all. The concrete was cold through my socks, since I kicked off the muddy boots by the door out of an old habit from site walks, and when I reached the far wall I turned and held out the tape's brass hook across forty feet of bare floor."Take this."Dorian looked at the hook, then at me, and came down the room in his good shoes and took it without a single question. He had rolled his sleeves to the elbow somewhere on the way, which I took to be a sign of intent."Stand on the first mark by the column. I'll walk it back.""You've measured it. Forty-one and a half.""With my feet, and I'd like it checked by something less biased." I crouched, pressed the case against the baseboard, and paid the tape out along the floor. "Hold it flat. If it sags
The Other Mrs. Cross Chapter 90
Isla POVI didn't call him from the diner. I paid for both sandwiches before Ruth could reach for the check, thanked her for it, let Gus lean against my knee for a full ten seconds as a sign of permission, and drove back toward the city with the radio off and the fox notebook open on the passenger seat to a page of mud-streaked sketches I'd been so proud of an hour earlier.It wasn't anger, quite. I turned it over the whole way home, the way I turned over every strange line item that fell, looking for the place where it stopped adding up. A man had picked up a phone in September and said a name, and that was all it came to, as far as I could tell. But in September I still believed my husband was a good man who travelled a lot, and somewhere nearby a person I barely knew had been setting small things in my path, and I developed a very well-trained instinct about people who arranged things for me.The print shop on Alder Street was cold and smelled of ink and old radiators. I let myself
The Other Mrs. Cross Chapter 89
Isla POV Camille arrived at ten to six in yesterday's sweater with a travel mug in each hand and the stunned, bright look of a woman who had never once been awake at that hour on purpose. She took one look at my trousers, which were the oldest I owned and had a paint stain on the knee, and handed me the larger mug without a word. "Go," she said. "I've got her. We're doing waffles and a conversation about whether hamsters need breakfast." "She'll want the yellow cup." "I know about the yellow cup." She shooed me toward the door with the back of her hand. "Isla. Go build something." The road to Millbrook was dark for the first half hour and gray for the second, with fog lying in the low fields like spilled milk, and I drove it with the heater on high and a thermos jammed between my knees, running through a list I didn't need. Two tapes, a hundred feet and a twenty-five. Stakes, flagging, a plumb bob I found in
The Other Mrs. Cross Chapter 88
Isla POVBy one o'clock the courthouse steps were bright and loud with lunch-hour traffic, and the three of us stood at the bottom with no plan, like guests who arrive at a party and find it already over. Priya had gone off toward the parking structure with the clerk and a calculator, muttering about fees, after pressing my hand between both of hers and saying, "Go home. Eat something. Read nothing." Camille was wiping her eyes with the cuff of her sage sweater. Nora was holding her paper cup of water, still full."I never testified," she said. "I practiced eleven times on a staircase.""You were very good on the staircase.""I want a refund." She looked at the cup as though it had personally let her down and drank all of it. "I had a speech about Josh and the tablet. It had a pause in the middle.""Save the pause," Camille said. "You'll need it for Thanksgiving." Then she turned to me with great seriousness. "I said I needed a sandwich.
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