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Chapter 72: He Told Her
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2026-08-12 19:04:38POV: Charlotte
He came through the door at exactly twenty minutes.I was in the entrance hall when he arrived, and he saw me immediately, and something in his face when he did told me the drive home had been a kind of drive, the kind where you're carrying something and you know you’re carrying it and you’re moving toward the moment of putting it down.”Come and sit down,” he said.We went to the informal lounge and he sat across from me and didn’t hedge and didn’t bui
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POV: CharlotteI didn’t tell him what I was going to do.That was deliberate. Telling him would have turned it into a conversation, and a conversation would have given him the opportunity to be reasonable about it, to thank me and tell me it wasn’t necessary, to manage the offer carefully and at a distance that kept it from landing anywhere it could actually change something.So I didn’t tell him.I just got up earlier.The first morning I was in the kitchen before Helen, which was unusual enough that when she came in and found me at the counter with his medication schedule open and the doses already sorted she stopped in the doorway for half a second before she continued into the room and said good morning and went to the kettle without commenting on what I was doing.I appreciated that about Helen.Damien appeared about twenty minutes later, which was his usual time, and he came through the kitchen door already looking at his phone
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