His Wife On Paper のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 121 - チャプター 130

Eliora's POV"Are you sure about this?"His voice was low. Not rushed. Not demanding. Just… careful. The way you speak around something fragile.I looked at him for a long moment. Really looked. The loosened collar of his shirt. The faint shadows carved beneath his eyes from three nights of no sleep.The slight tremor in his jaw that he was trying very hard to control.Kian Donovan, the man who moved markets with a single signature, was standing before me like a man who had forgotten how to breathe."Yes," I said, my voice barely audible, "I'm sure." That didn't stop the frantic pounding of my heart.Something shifted in his face. Something cracked open behind his eyes, not the controlled, calculated CEO, but the man underneath him.The one I had spent three years married to and somehow never fully met. The one I had spent two years trying to forget.He didn't pull me in with the same urgency as before. He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers barely grazi

Eliora's POV Twenty minutes later I was standing in the kitchen in Kian's robe, it swallowed me whole, the sleeves falling past my hands, the hem hitting my knees, with damp hair and what I could only describe as an embarrassing amount of warmth sitting in the center of my chest.The kitchen smelled like butter and coffee and something sweet Mrs. Halloway had been baking since before either of us were awake.Morning light was pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows in long gold sheets, making the whole room feel like something out of a life I hadn't let myself imagine having.Ezra was propped up in his high chair at the kitchen island, both fists wrapped around a piece of toast that was losing the structural integrity battle. He had jam on his nose. He had jam on his cheek. I had no idea how he had managed to get jam on his ear but he had done it."Mummy!" The toast was immediately abandoned, both arms shooting up."Baby." I crossed the kitchen and kissed every jammy part of his

Eliora's POV"You zoned out again."I turned my head. Zoey was watching me from the lounger beside mine, oversized sunglasses pushed up into her hair, arms crossed over her chest with the particular energy of someone who had been waiting patiently to say something and had officially run out of patience."I was just thinking," I said."You were staring at the sky for four minutes without blinking. That's not thinking, that's buffering." She pointed a finger at me. "You scared us, you know. All those days of zoning out, going quiet, disappearing inside yourself. Kian and Drew thought we were losing you. I thought we were losing you."The afternoon sun sat heavy and warm on my skin. The pool stretched out in front of us, catching the light in small, bright flickers. On the far side, Drew and Kian were doing what men do when they have been handed drinks and told to relax, sitting in lawn chairs, saying very little, existing in that particular comfortable silence that seemed to come nat

Kian's POV"Tell me it isn't true."My mother set her teacup down sllowly. The way she did everything, with precision, as if even the smallest action was being observed and judged and she intended to come out winning.She looked up at me from her chair by the window. The Donovan family home was immaculate as always, every surface polished, every cushion positioned, flowers arranged like they had been placed by someone who charged for the service.It smelled like expensive candles and old money and the particular kind of quiet that exists in houses where warmth was never really the point.I had grown up in this house. I had never once felt at home in it."Kian," she said. "Sit down.""I'm not sitting down." I stayed where I was, just inside the doorway, jacket still on. I hadn't planned to stay long. "Tell me the photo was real. Tell me you found it, that it existed, that you had a reason… any reason…. for showing it to her."Tonia's expression didn't change. That was the thing about

Eliora's POVI couldn't sleep.Not because I was falling apart with the bomb Kian dropped on me last night. I had expected to fall apart but I hadn't….I had made my peace with Kian, said the things I needed to say, and meant every word of it. That wasn't the problem.The problem was that my mind wouldn't stop.I lay in the dark with my eyes open and let it turn.Not in the sharp, painful way of someone being hit by something new, but in the quiet, relentless way of someone who has accepted a thing and is now simply living inside the full size of it. I had made peace with the path. I believed that. But peace doesn't mean you stop thinking. It just means the thinking doesn't break you anymore.Two years.I kept coming back to that. Two years. Not as an abstract number but as a lived thing, as every morning I had woken up alone, every night I had put Ezra to sleep in a flat that was too quiet, every time I had looked at my son's face and felt the complicated ache of loving something c