All Chapters of His Wife On Paper : Chapter 161 - Chapter 170

Eliora's POV The hardest thing I had ever done was not run after them when they took him through those doors.I had tried. I had taken three steps before a nurse, young, firm, apologetic in the specific way of someone who had done this a hundred times, stepped into my path with both hands up and told me quietly that I needed to wait. That they had him. That the best thing I could do for him right now was stay on this side of the door.I stood there and watched the doors swing shut.And then I had found the nearest chair and sat in it and I had not moved since.The waiting room was the particular kind of ugly that hospital waiting rooms always were,plastic chairs bolted to the floor in rows, fluorescent light that flattened everything it touched, a television mounted in the corner with the volume off and subtitles running beneath footage nobody was watching. The smell of antiseptic sat in the back of my throat. Somewhere down the corridor a trolley wheeled past at intervals, its whee

Eliora's POV "Tell me everything."Drew said it quietly, without preamble, the way he said things when he was done with the version of a conversation that happened on the surface. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely clasped and he was looking at me with the particular focus of someone who had decided they were going to hear whatever came next without flinching.I looked at him.I was so tired. The bone-deep, behind-the-eyes kind of tired that made everything feel slightly removed from itself, like the world had developed a thin layer of glass between itself and me.I had been holding things in the correct shape for hours, for the doctor, for Ezra, for the waiting room, for the phone call with Zoey, and the idea of holding anything in any shape for one more second was almost more than I had.So I didn't.I told him everything. From when we stepped on foot in this town, to the explosion, the warehouse floor and the cold and Mia's voice in the dark. Elijah and the rop

Kian's POV The first thing I was aware of was her hand.Not the pain, that came later, arriving with the slow insistence of something that had been waiting politely. Not the sounds or the light or the weight of my own body making itself known in ways that were specific and unpleasant. Her hand. Resting near mine on the rail, loose, like she had fallen asleep reaching for something and hadn't quite let go.I knew it was hers before I could see anything properly.I surfaced slowly. Consciousness coming in layers the way it does when the body has been through something and is being careful about what it lets back in first. The mechanical steadiness of something beeping at intervals. And underneath all of it, rising through everything else like something that had been waiting for me to be still enough to hear it —Her voice.I'm not ready.I had turned those three words over in the dark of wherever I had been. Examined them carefully. Understood exactly what they contained and what the

Eliora's POV I stood outside Kian's door for a long time.The folder Elijah had given me was in my hands. Elijah's handwriting on the tab, my father's notes inside it, the physical proof of everything Mia had thrown at me at Kian's like it was nothing…..like it was just another weapon in a room full of weapons and she was simply choosing the one most likely to cut deepest.It had cut deepest.I had been carrying the cut for days without letting myself look at it properly because looking at it properly would have meant stopping and I could not stop. Not while Ezra was missing. Not while there was still something to run toward or fight for or hold together.But Ezra was asleep two floors up with Zoey watching him.And the door in front of me was just a door.And behind it was Kian, who had known. Who had known before the wedding, before the vows, before every moment I had spent trusting him with the parts of myself I didn't trust easily, he had known and he had said nothing and I was

Kian's POV The house had never felt this large before.That was the thing nobody told you about stillness, it had a way of expanding the space around you until every room felt like something you had to cross rather than simply be in. I had lived in this house for years. I knew every corner of it. And now I was moving through it like a stranger, noticing things I had never noticed before because I had always been moving too fast to notice anything.The way the morning light came through the kitchen window at a specific angle between seven and eight and then was gone. The sound the third stair made that I had been meaning to fix for two years. The particular silence of a house at two in the afternoon on a weekday when the world outside was doing its busy ordinary things and you were not part of any of them.Three weeks since the hospital.Two weeks since she left.I sat in my study and worked and told myself this was manageable. Some days I believed it. Other days the word manageab