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Chapter 78: Taking Charge
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2026-08-19 19:00:15
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The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 79: What Eleanor Asks
POV: CharlotteEleanor called on a Tuesday, which wasn’t unusual but what was unusual was that she called my phone instead of Damien’s.I was in the library when it rang, my notebook open but not moving the way it moved on good days, and I looked at the screen and felt the tension that Eleanor’s name always produced in me, the sense of needing to be fully present rather than half in whatever I’d been thinking about before.”Charlotte,” she said, when I answered. “Do you have a few minutes?””Of course,” I said.She didn’t ask about the foundation or the upcoming calendar or any of the things she sometimes used as the opening of a conversation before she got to what she actually wanted to say. She went straight to it, which told me she’d been thinking about this call for a while before making it.”How is he?” she said. “Actually. I don’t want to hear the usual response he use to give whenever I ask him”I sat back in the reading chair.
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 78: Taking Charge
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
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 77: Taking it on
POV: CharlotteThe building looked different from the inside.I’d built a whole picture of it from the outside over months, the brass plaque, the particular way Damien walked out of those doors with something quieter in him than when he’d gone in, and the inside didn’t match any of it. Clean, softly lit, deliberately unintimidating, and I walked through it beside him for the first time and kept my face easy.Keller was slight, late forties, careful in the way of someone who had delivered difficult news for long enough that precision and gentleness had become the same instinct. He shook my hand and said he was glad I’d come and I believed him, and we sat down and he opened the file.Forty minutes.That was how long it took, and in forty minutes I understood the situation more precisely than I had from months of observation and overheard phone calls and late night conversations combined. Keller spoke in the language of medicine and I stopped him tw
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 76: What She Doesn’t Know
POV: Victoria I walked out of the hotel feeling better than I had any right to feel. That was the truth, and I was trying to be honest with myself more consistently these days, it was one of the things I’d decided in Lisbon and had been attempting to maintain with varying success since coming home. So honestly, walking out of that hotel bar after ninety minutes with Sebastian Blackwood, I felt lighter than I had since the evening before. I knew all of that. And I still felt lighter. Because he’d listened. That was the simple, slightly embarrassing truth. He sat across from me and listened to everything I said with rapt attention that made you feel like the person in front of you was actually interested in what you were telling them rather than waiting for their turn, and I had been lacking that since I came back to New York, so much so that ninety minutes of
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 75: Someone Who Understands
POV: SebastianShe was easier to read than I’d expected.Not in a way that made her simple, Victoria Whitmore was not simple, I’d done enough research to understand that clearly before I sent the message last night. But she was readable in the way that people were predictable when they were carrying something heavy and hadn’t yet found the right place to set it down. The weight showed in small things, the way she'd held her glass, the slight tightening around her eyes when I said it wasn’t her fault, the specific quality of her silence when I said it, sitting with the sentence rather than deflecting it the way someone without that particular wound would have.She’d been hurt last night.Not just the rejection, though that was there too, I’d have been able to see that even without the information I already had. Something deeper than the rejection. Something about what the rejection confirmed, about what it told her about her own position in a situation
The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood Chapter 74: A Familiar Face
POV: VictoriaThe response came within minutes.”Someone who thinks you’ve been treated unfairly. Meet me and I’ll explain.”I should have put the phone down.Any reasonable version of myself, the version that had spent eight months in Lisbon becoming someone with better judgment than she’d had before, would have put the phone down and blocked the number and gone to bed and dealt with the humiliation of the evening in the private, undramatic way she’d been trying to deal with things lately.I didn’t put the phone down.I told myself it was curiosity. That was the most defensible explanation for why I agreed to meet a stranger who had somehow heard about a private conversation that had happened less than two hours ago. Curiosity. The itch of an unanswered question that had always been harder for me to resist than it probably should have been.We met the following evening at a hotel bar in midtown.Neutral ground. Public enough t
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