All Chapters of Married To My Best Friend; Her Blood, My Passion : Chapter 61 - Chapter 65

HaileyEvans was still on the phone when I hung up and went downstairs.The monitors had been flickering for twenty minutes before I called him. I had been standing in the kitchen watching the basement door like it might open on its own, telling myself it was just an electrical issue, telling myself everything was fine.It wasn't fine.I pushed through the study, pressed the hidden button, and descended the stairs alone for the first time without Evans walking ahead of me. The corridor felt longer than usual. The hum of the machinery seemed louder. My footsteps echoed off the clean white walls and I focused on breathing steadily.I pulled a chair close to the tank and sat down.Nancy floated exactly as she always did. Still. Peaceful. Her dark hair drifting slowly around her face in the pale blue fluid. Her hands loose at her sides. Her eyes closed.My face.Every time I sat here I had to take a moment to absorb it all over again. The identical line of her nose, the exact shape of her

Hailey's POV Evans came inside looking like he had seen a ghost.He closed the front door behind him slowly, locked it, then stood in the hallway without moving for a moment. I watched him from the kitchen doorway. His face was doing that thing it did when he was processing something too large to immediately put into words."Sit down," I said.He came into the kitchen and sat. I put a fresh cup of tea in front of him. He wrapped both hands around it but didn't drink."Tell me about Lena first," I said, sitting across from him. "Then whatever else happened outside."He looked up. "You saw?""I saw you stop on the front step and stand there for two minutes," I said. "Something happened. But tell me about Lena first because I need to understand Nancy's situation before anything else."He nodded and set the cup down.He told me everything Lena had said. The compound. The ten weeks. The cellular deterioration. The neutralizing agent that could slow things down but not reverse them. I list

Hailey's POV Eli had not called.I had sent that message to Evans to get him home faster and I was not sorry about it. He needed to be here and I needed to tell him what had actually happened, which was that Eli had sent one more message while Evans was at the board meeting and then gone silent completely.The message said simply: The collection. Use it. It is the right move. I am watching.I had stared at that message for a long time. He knew about the collection. He knew about the board situation. He had been watching us closely enough to understand the details of a corporate power struggle happening inside a building he had never entered.Or had he.Evans came through the front door at ten past ten looking like someone had wrung him out and hung him up to dry. I handed him coffee and told him the truth about the Eli message before he could ask anything else. He read it twice and sat down heavily."He is right though," Evans said. "The collection is still the right move.""I know,"