All Chapters of Married To My Best Friend; Her Blood, My Passion : Chapter 91 - Chapter 99

POV: HaileyNobody moved.The car was completely still, engine running, Calix's hands on the wheel, and nobody said a single word because there was nothing to say to that, there was no sentence in the world that fit after what Iris just said.Nancy broke the silence first. "What did you just say?"Iris turned her head slowly toward Nancy, like the movement cost her something. "She used her own DNA," she said, "Frost didn't just engineer us from random genetic material, she used herself as the base, we are hers, all of us, she just, she built us differently than a person is supposed to be built."I was still looking at her face. My face. The same nose, the same mouth, the same small crease at the corner of the eye that I had always thought was just mine. I had looked in mirrors my whole life and never once thought I was looking at anyone other than myself and now I was sitting in the back of a car looking at another version of me and trying to understand that we came from the same woma

POV: HaileyI read it three times.The first time my eyes moved over the words without fully taking them in, just the shape of them, the handwriting, the specific way she formed her letters, small and controlled and leaning very slightly to the right. The second time I slowed down and let each sentence land properly. The third time I read it like I was looking for something I had missed, some hidden layer underneath the words themselves, some explanation for how a person could write something like this and still have done everything she did.I never wanted to let you go. But they made me.I put the photograph down on the table and slid it toward Nancy without saying anything.Nancy picked it up. She read the back. She set it down and pushed it toward Iris.Iris looked at it for a long time without picking it up, just read it where it lay on the table, then she sat back in her chair and stared at the ceiling and said nothing.The kitchen was very quiet. Evans and Mabel were on the othe

POV: HaileyEvans came to bed just after four.I heard him come up the stairs, heard him stop outside the guest room for a moment the way he did when he was checking on something, and then he came into our room and moved around to his side in the dark, quiet the way he was always quiet when he thought I was asleep, and I lay still and let him think that because I didn't have the energy for a conversation and I could tell from the way he moved that he didn't either.He lay down. The mattress shifted. He was on his back, not touching me, which was how he slept when his mind was still running.I stared at the ceiling.My ability was doing the thing it did sometimes when I was too tired to manage it properly, running at a low frequency underneath everything like a radio left on in another room, not loud enough to make out specific words but present enough that you couldn't quite ignore it. What I was picking up from Evans wasn't deception, it wasn't the sharp specific signal of someone hi

POV: HaileyI sat up slowly.Evans was on the edge of the bed watching me with the careful stillness of someone who has just said something they can't take back and is waiting to find out what it costs them, and I looked at his face and then I looked at the folded page in his hand and I said, "Show me."He handed it over.I read it. I read it again. The numbers meant less to me than they would to him but the confirmation note at the bottom was written in plain language and I understood plain language perfectly well."Six weeks," I said."That's what Marcus says.""And you've known for three days."He didn't look away. "I wasn't certain.""You just showed me a confirmed lab result, Evans.""I know.""So you were certain."He was quiet for a moment. "I was afraid of what it meant if I was right," he said, "I kept thinking I needed more time to work out what to do with it before I told you, and that was wrong, I should have told you the moment I saw the data, I'm sorry."I looked at the

POV: HaileyI left the kitchen while Evans was still talking.Not because I didn't want to hear the rest of it, but because if I sat at that table for one more minute looking at the test and listening to the shape of everything that had been built around me without my knowledge I was going to stop being composed and I needed to stay composed for a little longer.I went upstairs and sat on the floor of the bedroom with my back against the bed and took out my phone and found the number I had for Calix, the one I had saved years ago and never deleted even after it stopped working, the way you keep things that used to matter.I called it.The line didn't even ring. Just the flat, immediate tone of a number that no longer existed.I sat there and went through every version of his contact I had ever had, the number from before he disappeared, the one he had given Mabel at some point, an email address I had found on an old message thread, a third number that Nancy had given me once and said