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Chapter 34
publish date:
2026-11-07 16:21:55
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Thirty Days Before I leave Chapter 34
Chapter 34JulianI didn't sit down.I stood beside my empty chair and looked at the phone on the tablecloth, and for a moment the photograph on the screen didn't mean anything at all. It was just a page. Lined paper, a little creased, covered in small neat handwriting I knew better by now than my own. A grid of dates down the left side. Short notes in the margins. And near the bottom, a cluster of three days with red circles drawn around them so hard that the ink had pressed through the paper.Then I read the dates, and they meant something.The first circled day was today.I picked the phone up. My hand was very steady. I've always been good at keeping my hands steady in rooms where other people would like to see them shake.I swiped to the next photograph. Another page, the same grid, earlier dates. A column labeled with abbreviations I didn't understand at first and then understood all at once. A small note in the margin, written slanting upward as though she'd added it later.Win
Thirty Days Before I leave Chapter 33
Chapter 33SeraI eased the bedroom door open with the notebook pressed flat against my ribs under my cardigan.The lamp was off. The curtains were open, and a little grey light from the courtyard came through the window and lay across the end of the bed. The sheets were pulled straight. His side was empty.I let out a breath. Maybe he was still in his study. Maybe I had a few minutes to hide it properly before..."Where were you?"I nearly dropped it.Julian was sitting in the armchair by the window. I hadn't seen him because the chair was turned half away from the door and the shadows there were deep. He was still dressed in the shirt he'd worn at dinner, the sleeves pushed up, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands loosely clasped. He didn't get up. He didn't turn on the lamp. He just sat there in the dark and waited.I pressed my arm tighter against my side.There was a lie ready on my tongue. A walk. The kitchen. Couldn't sleep. It would have been so easy.I was so tired o
Thirty Days Before I leave Chapter 32
Chapter 32Cassian"It's not what you think," she said.She said it too fast. Her hands were wrapped around the notebook so tightly that her knuckles had gone white, and she was holding it against her chest the same way she'd held my letter two nights ago, like it was something alive that might get away from her."They're just notes," she went on. "About my health. My doctor wanted me to keep track of some things. It's private, Cass, it's nothing to do with Julian or the thirty days or...""Window opens day seven," I said quietly. "Best odds day eight. If not this cycle, next window falls too close to day thirty. Can't count on him still being in my bed by then."She stopped talking.I hadn't meant to memorize it. I'd only read the notebook once, sitting on the edge of my mother's desk with the door half open, listening for her car in the drive. But some lines you only have to read once. That one had gone into me like a splinter and stayed.Sera stared at me across the firelight. Her
Thirty Days Before I leave Chapter 31
Chapter 31Sera"Just old notes," Julian repeated slowly.He was still holding my wrist. Not hard. His thumb rested over the place where my pulse was racing, and I knew he could feel it, the way it hammered against his skin like something trying to get out."Yes," I said. "Nothing important."He looked at me for a long moment. I had seen that look across boardroom tables. It was the look he gave people when he already knew the answer and was waiting to see whether they'd be honest enough to give it to him themselves.I didn't give it to him.He let go of my wrist."All right," he said.That was all. Two words, quiet and even. He didn't push. He didn't ask what kind of notes, or why I'd turned a drawer upside down over the rug for something that didn't matter. He just stepped back and looked at the mess I'd made on the floor, the hand cream and the paperback and the hairbrush scattered across the carpet, and then he looked at me again, and something in his eyes closed very quietly, lik
Thirty Days Before I leave Chapter 30
Chapter 30JulianMarcus was still talking in my ear.I could hear his voice, small and tinny, saying something about a ferry route and a harbor master's records and a name he wanted to check before he was sure. I didn't take in a single word of it. I was standing in the boathouse doorway with the phone pressed to my ear, and at the end of the dock, with the wind whipping her hair across her face, Lucien Hale had his hand on my wife's cheek and his mouth on hers.It was brief. It barely lasted a second. He pulled back almost as soon as he'd leaned in.But she hadn't moved.That was what I saw, more clearly than anything. Not the kiss itself, but the moment before it. He'd leaned in slowly, so slowly that a child could have stepped away, and she'd stood there in the scarf he had wrapped around her neck and let him.Then her eyes found mine over his shoulder, and I watched every bit of color leave her face."Julian? Are you still there?""I'll call you back," I said, and ended the call.
Thirty Days Before I leave Chapter 29
Chapter 29SeraI almost put it in my bag.The thought came to me clearly and calmly while I stood there holding it against my chest. I could take it home. I could open it alone in the sewing room with the door locked, where nobody could watch my face while I read whatever my father had needed to say to me. That was what the old Sera would have done. She'd have folded it away and waited for a private moment, the way she'd folded away every feeling she'd had for three years.But I had already waited eleven years. I had spent eleven years thinking my father had simply walked out of my life one ordinary morning and decided not to come back. I couldn't wait the forty minutes it would take to drive home.I sat down at the wooden table by the window.Neither of them said anything. Julian pulled out the chair beside me and sat, close enough that I could feel him there without him touching me. Lucien stayed standing on the other side of the table with his hands in his coat pockets, watching t
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