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Chapter 8
publish date:
2026-10-01 18:51:22
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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
Thirty Days Before I leave Chapter 28
Chapter 28 Julian I wasn't nervous about what Lucien might show us. Whatever my grandfather had done, I had already started to make my peace with the fact that it was going to be ugly. What I was dreading was something smaller and much harder to admit.I was dreading watching her see him.I was dreading the moment she got out of this car and walked toward another man who had been planning to meet her alone, and I would find out from her face what he was to her. Whether her eyes changed when she saw him. Whether she smiled at him the way she'd smiled at me in the kitchen this morning.I'd seen that photograph of her in the gallery, laughing up at him. I'd seen it on my bed.I didn't want to see it in person.The boathouse appeared around a bend in the road. It was old and weathered, grey timber gone silver with age, half hidden by willows at the edge of the water. A long wooden dock ran out into the river behind it. A black car was parked under the trees.And standing at the end of t
Thirty Days Before I leave Chapter 27
Chapter 27JulianThe smoke alarm went off at seven fifteen, which was exactly what I'd been waiting for.I stood at the kitchen counter with a dish towel in one hand and the grill pan in the other, watching four slices of bread turn black under the flame. The sugar on top had bubbled and gone dark and bitter, the edges were charred, and a thin grey cloud was curling up toward the ceiling where the alarm was screaming its head off. I had never in my life deliberately ruined food. I'd never really made any food at all. The staff did that, and before the staff, my grandfather's cook, and before that, nobody, because my mother didn't believe in kitchens.But I'd said it last night, half asleep, with Sera's head on my chest. Tomorrow I'm going to burn you some.And I didn't break promises to her anymore. Not even the ones I made by accident.I heard her running before I saw her. Bare feet slapping on the back stairs, fast and panicked, and then she burst through the kitchen doorway in not
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