ホーム / Romance / The wife I swore I’d never be / Chapter 67 — What the Money Was For

共有

Chapter 67 — What the Money Was For

作者: Spli_vena
last update 公開日: 2026-07-05 23:25:50

Kelvin pov

Donald Hargrove was waiting outside my building when I got back from the studio.

Not lurking. Donald didn’t lurk; lurking was for men who thought they might be wrong to be somewhere. He stood on the pavement with his coat open despite the cold, hands loose at his sides, the posture of a man who had simply decided this was where he would be standing today, and everyone else’s schedule would have to work around it.

“Mr. Rae.”

He didn’t offer a hand.

“Donald.”

I stopped a careful distan
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 wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 115 — Everything, and No Way to Say It

    Margaret pov The house had gone quiet after his footsteps faded down the stairs.Margaret lay where he’d left her, the pillow damp under her cheek where she hadn’t been able to turn her head away from it, the blanket pulled up crooked from where his hand had smoothed it and stopped halfway. She could feel the crooked edge against her collarbone. She could not fix it.The clock on the far wall ticked.She had counted the ticks before, on other nights, when there was nothing else her mind would agree to hold onto instead. She did not count them tonight. Tonight there was too much else, arriving all at once, faster than the small mechanical sound could keep pace with.Her right hand lay outside the blanket.She looked at it for a long time.She made it move.A knuckle first, then two fingers, the effort of it arriving somewhere behind her eyes as a dull, familiar ache, the same ache that came now with almost everything her body still agreed to do. The fingers curled. Uncurled. It took l

  • The wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 114 — My Love Ruined Me

    Anita pov Margaret’s decline had been slow enough that no one had named it at all until it was already well underway.A tremor in her hand that the family doctor called early-onset and unremarkable. A slowness in her speech that everyone put down to tiredness, to grief she hadn’t fully processed, to age catching up all at once. By the time Donald suggested we visit together, she had not left her bed in four days, and the housekeeper who’d been sitting with her said Margaret sometimes struggled to finish a sentence she’d started clearly.I had not seen her since the day she confronted Donald about Manny. I did not know, walking into her bedroom behind my husband, that I was looking at a woman whose illness was not what any of us had been told it was.“Mother.”Donald sat at the edge of the bed and took her hand, and something in his face did the thing I had learned, across months now, to distrust on sight.Composed grief.Practiced tenderness.“How are you feeling today?”Margaret’s e

  • The wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 113 — What He Was Asked to Collect

    Callum pov Donald’s text had come through at six that morning, before Callum had even finished his coffee.Collect Mother’s prescription yourself today. Pharmacy on Deel Street, not the usual one. Text me when it’s done.Callum read it twice, standing at his own kitchen counter in yesterday’s shirt, and felt nothing about it beyond the small, ordinary irritation of an errand added to a day that already had enough in it.He finished his coffee.He kissed his daughter’s head on his way out the door, same as every morning, and she barely stirred, six years old and unbothered by the hour.He drove to the Hargrove house thinking about nothing more complicated than traffic on the bridge.The paper bag sat on the passenger seat like it weighed more than it should.Donald had told him to collect it himself.Not the usual pharmacy, either. A smaller one two boroughs over, the kind with a hand-painted sign and a bell over the door that Callum had ducked his head to clear without thinking.The

  • The wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 112 — A Name on a Receipt

    Kelvin pov Marcus was already sitting in my kitchen when I came downstairs, laptop open, two cups of coffee poured and going cold beside it.He had a key. He’d had one for months and I’d never once regretted giving it to him, until this exact morning, when the sight of him already in my flat before I’d even had coffee told me more than anything he’d said yet.“I found the storage facility’s old billing records,” he said. “Before they went digital, before anyone thought to worry about a paper trail. A clerk who’s been there fifteen years still has the archive boxes in her own garage. Cost me more than I want to admit, but she let me photograph everything.”He turned his laptop toward me.“Unit 4B. Rented eight months ago. Not by Callum.” Marcus tapped the screen. “By a shell company. But the shell company’s registered agent, the actual signature on the paperwork, belongs to a lawyer who does exactly one other thing on record.”“What?”“He handles overflow work for Donald’s firm. Small

  • The wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 111 — A Thing That Never Happened

    DonaldHe chose the dinner table for it, because a dinner table gave a lie somewhere ordinary to hide.“I keep thinking about that weekend at your father’s cottage,” Donald said, cutting into his food without looking up. “The one where the boiler broke and we spent the whole two days wrapped in every blanket in the house. I still can’t believe your father laughed about it afterward instead of being furious.”Anita looked up.There was no such weekend. There was no cottage. Her father did not own one, had never owned one, had mentioned once, long before, that his own father had sold the family’s small coastal place before Anita was born. Donald had invented the entire memory an hour earlier, in his study, turning it over until it had the right texture, the boiler and the blankets chosen precisely because they were the kind of detail a real memory would contain.He had learned, across weeks now, exactly how to watch her face. Not for the obvious signs. For the smaller ones underneath th

  • The wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 110 — A Different Corner

    AnitaKelvin texted at nine that morning, before I’d even finished my coffee.Change of plan. Meet me at the place on Ashworth instead of the studio corner. I want to show you something.I hadn’t questioned it. He did that sometimes now, small last-minute changes, and I’d stopped reading danger into every one of them months ago, back when I still flinched at anything unplanned.The place on Ashworth turned out to be a bookshop with a café tucked into the back of it, shelves rising to the ceiling, the smell of old paper and fresh coffee tangled together in a way that made the whole room feel like somewhere time moved slower.“You found this?” I asked, looking around.“I’ve known about it for a while. Never had a reason to bring anyone.” He pulled out a chair for me at a small table wedged between two shelves, half-hidden from the rest of the room. “I thought you might like somewhere that wasn’t the studio, or the river, or anywhere either of us has ever had to be careful in.”“Somewher

  • The wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 5-Still

    One message.A number I did not recognise.No words.Just a photograph.I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and looked at it.Donald. Lying back against a woman I had never seen before. His head on her chest. Her hand resting in his hair like it belonged there. His face completely open in a wa

  • The wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 4-Professional distance

    His footsteps stopped just inside the kitchen doorway.I had turned the phone over by then. Both hands on the counter. Face arranged into something that had no name for what was behind it.I did not turn around.I stood there and listened. Donald’s silences were never empty. They were always full o

  • The wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 3-The routine

    The coffee machine made its noise at six forty-seven.I didn’t move to pour until it finished. I stood at the counter with my hands wrapped around nothing and listened to it run. That sound. The only sound in the whole house. The specific quiet that exists when you are the only one awake and have n

  • The wife I swore I’d never be    Chapter 2-The silence after

    Donald did not say a word on the way home. Not one. Not when I fell into step beside him as the evening wound down. Not when we collected our coats and walked out into the cool Velmoor night. Not when he opened the car door for me with the quiet efficiency of a man performing a task he stopped t

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