His Wife On Paper 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 131 - 챕터 140

Eliora's POVI had been in courtrooms before.Not like this, not with this much at stake, not with my son's name on a document being argued over by people in expensive suits who had never once held him or heard him laugh or watched him fall asleep mid-sentence with a piece of toast still in his hand. But I had been in rooms like this. Rooms where the air was deliberately neutral, where the lighting was designed to flatten everything, where the furniture said this is serious and the silence said we decide things here.I had learned to be still in rooms like this. To keep my face composed and my hands loose in my lap and give nothing away, because anything you showed became something they could use.But sitting at that table with Kian to my left and my lawyer to my right and Tonia directly across the room, close enough that I could see the particular set of her jaw, the way she sat with that straight-backed composure that I used to mistake for dignity.Kian's hand found mine under the

Eliora's POVMargaret smelled like cinnamon and fabric softener and every safe thing I had ever known.I hugged her in the doorway for probably too long. She didn't rush me. She just held on with both arms and made that small sound she always made, a soft exhale, like she had been holding her breath on the way here and was only now letting it go."Let me look at you," she said, pulling back and holding me at arm's length. Her eyes moved over my face the way a doctor's do, checking, assessing, looking for damage. Whatever she found made her click her tongue. "You've lost weight.""I'm fine, Margaret.""You always say that." She cupped my face in both hands briefly, warm, dry palms, the hands I had known since I was twenty-four years old and then released me. "Where is he?"As if on cue, Ezra appeared from behind my legs where he had been hiding with the confidence of someone who fully intended to be found. He looked up at Margaret with enormous, evaluating eyes.Margaret crouched down

Eliora's POVTwenty-four hours.That was how long Ezra had been gone. Twenty-four hours of phone calls and search teams and officers moving through our home with gloved hands and quiet voices, treating everything like evidence, treating the place where my son had lived and laughed and said vroom over a toy car like a crime scene.Because it was.I sat on the sofa in yesterday's clothes and watched a woman I didn't know dust the windowsill in Ezra's room through the open doorway.He went missing right under my nose. Right here. In this apartment. While I slept.How had I not heard anything? How had I not known? I was his mother. I was supposed to know."Mrs Donovan."I looked up. Officer Reeves…..tall, steady, the kind of face that had delivered bad news enough times to know how to hold itself, was standing in front of me with a notepad. Kian had introduced him as an old friend. Right now he didn't look like anyone's friend. He looked like a man doing a job."I need to ask you a few

Eliora's POV"Eliora.”I didn't get far.The hallway.... That was as far as I made it before I heard his footsteps behind me,"Stay away from me." I didn't turn around. I kept walking. My hands were shaking and my vision was doing something strange at the edges and I needed to get somewhere, anywhere, that wasn't that room with Mia's satisfied face and the echo of everything she had just said."Please—""I said stay away from me, Kian."He stopped. I felt it more than heard it….the absence of his footsteps, the sudden stillness behind me. I stopped too. I don't know why. My body just…. stopped.I stood in the middle of the hallway with my back to him and my hand pressed flat against the wall and tried to breathe."I'm sorry." His voice was raw, stripped of everything, the composure, the control, all of it gone. "I'm sorry, Eliora. I should have told you. I tried to tell you…. I wanted to, I was going to—""I don't want to hear it." The words came out quiet. "I don't want your apology

Eliora's POVI stood on the pavement and stared at his name on my screen.Elijah.The name I had spent weeks trying to make sense of. The man I had thought was my friend, my safety net, the person who showed up when everyone else didn't.My thumb hovered over the green button.I answered."Eliora." His voice was the same. That was the first thing I noticed, it was exactly the same, the familiar warmth of it, and I hated that it was still familiar. "I'm glad you picked up.""Are you?" I kept my voice completely flat. Ahead of me Reeves was in the car, his back to me, still on his phone. "Why are you calling me, Elijah?"A pause. "I heard you've been going through something difficult. I wanted to—""Ezra is missing." I said it directly."My son has been missing for over a day. So if you called to check on me I'm going to need you to be a lot more specific about what you actually know."The silence that followed was a fraction too long."Missing?" His voice shifted in something surprisin