All Chapters of His Wife On Paper : Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Eliora's POV "I owe you an apology," she said. Her voice was careful in the way of someone who had rehearsed something and was now, in the actual moment, abandoning the rehearsal in favour of just saying the true thing. "Not one apology. Many. But I will start with the most important one."I said nothing.What was there to say?To be honest I don't know why I'm here?Why I am listening to her…..I don't know "I was not a good mother to you." The words came out slowly, like she was releasing them carefully, one at a time, afraid of what would happen if they came out too fast. "I was not there the way I should have been. I was interested in the wrong things, what you could provide, what our situation looked like from the outside, whether the surface of our family was presentable."She paused and started again. "Your father knew. He always knew what I was doing and he loved you the way I should have loved you and I told myself that between the two of us there was enough love in the ho

Eliora's POV Ezra had been awake since five thirty.I know this because I have also been awake since five thirty, not by choice but because a small person had appeared at my bedside in the dark and announced, at full volume and with complete conviction, that it was his birthday and therefore the day should begin immediately.I looked at the time on my phone then at my son's face in the dark, bright eyed and absolutely certain, his elephant under one arm and his serious expression firmly in place."It's five thirty, baby," I had told him."It's my birthday," he had replied, as though this made five thirty irrelevant. Which, apparently, it did.---By ten o'clock the garden looked like something Mrs Halloway had been quietly planning for weeks.Blue and yellow balloons tied to everything that could hold a balloon. A table along the back wall with food that had been arriving in covered dishes since yesterday afternoon. A cake in the kitchen that Ezra had inspected twice already with th

Kian's POV"Eliora."She was not stopping.Her heels clicked hard on the corridor floor and she was moving with the focused energy of a woman who had decided that forward was the only available direction and anything behind her, including her name being called, did not exist."Eliora. Wait."Still not stopping.I followed her down the corridor, past the framed photograph on the wall that Ezra had pointed at approximately forty times since he learned to point, past the side table with the keys and the bowl of stones that Ezra had relocated from the kitchen windowsill without consulting anyone, and I was about to call her name again when she stopped.Too quickly.The hem of her long dress caught her foot, I watched it happen in the specific slow motion of something you cannot prevent, her balance going, her hands coming out for something to grab that wasn't there.My arm caught her around the waist before she reached the floor.We froze.She was facing me now, both her hands gripping my

Kian's POV She was already there.I had been prepared for that, Eliora had never been late to anything in her life, it was one of the things about her that had always quietly impressed me, this woman who managed her time like it was a resource she respected, but seeing her actually sitting there at the corner table still caught me somewhere in the chest.She had her coat on still. Menu in her hands, studying it with the focused attention of someone doing due diligence, even though I was fairly certain she had already decided. She hadn't seen me yet and I stood in the doorway for a moment and let myself look at her the way I had not let myself look at her for three months, properly, without managing what it meant.Then she looked up.Something moved through her face, quick, unguarded, warm, the expression she had when she was feeling something she hadn't prepared a response for. Then she pulled it back into something more composed and set the menu down and straightened slightly in h

Kian's POV The boardroom looked exactly the same.That was the first thing I noticed when I walked in, that six months had passed, that everything had happened, and the room had simply waited. Same table, same chairs, same view of the city through the floor to ceiling glass on the east side. The same faint smell of coffee and of recycled air that every boardroom in every building like this one had. It had not changed at all.I had.I stood at the head of the table and looked at the faces arranged around it, twelve people, some of whom I had known for years, all of whom were doing the careful recalibration of people who thought they knew someone and were now deciding what they knew. I could see it moving through the room. Not hostility. Not warmth exactly. Something in between, the measured assessment of people who had watched the last three months from a distance and were now in the same room as me and forming their conclusions.I had prepared for this.I sat down."Let's begin,"