Semua Bab The Governor’s Wife, His beautiful ruin: Bab 141 - Bab 150

Evelyn Margaret told me not to come but I went anyway. I found a pharmacy two blocks from the courthouse and bought a black headscarf and a pair of oversized sunglasses and felt ridiculous putting them on while on the checkout . But I bought them anyway. Pulled the scarf low on my forehead in the car and checked my reflection once and looked away. It wasn’t perfect but it was enough to make someone look twice before recognising me and twice was all I needed. The public gallery was already half full by the time I slipped in through the back entrance and found the last seat in the furthest corner where the overhead light had blown and nobody had replaced it. I sat down and kept my head angled toward the floor and waited. The courtroom was nothing like the ones I used to work in. Smaller, lower ceilinged, the room that had absorbed decades of bad decisions and wore them in the walls and the scuffed floors and the bench that had been repaired so many times the wood grain didn’t ma

EvelynI don’t remember the drive home.I remember pulling into the driveway and sitting in the car for a long time after the engine cut and staring at the blue front door and thinking about how much I had loved this house when I first found it. How I had stood in the empty rooms and thought finally. Finally something that is just mine.I went inside.The bottle of red on the kitchen counter was three quarters full. I poured a glass and drank it standing at the sink looking at nothing and poured another before the first one had settled and took it with me into the sitting room and sat on the couch and stared at the wall.Tobias.Two years old. Dark eyed and round faced and reaching for the sugar dispenser like it was the only thing in the world that mattered. Two years old and Theo had known.I finished the second glass. Poured a third.The thing that kept snagging in me, kept catching on something raw every time I tried to move past it, was not even the baby. It was the calls. Two in

Evelyn The knock came at seven in the evening. I was on the couch with a glass of wine I hadn’t touched and the television on a channel I wasn’t watching and the overturned table still on its side because I hadn’t found a reason to fix it yet. I looked at the door and didn’t move for a moment and then the knock came again and I got up. Alfred was standing on my doorstep in a grey suit with his hands in his pockets looking like he’d just come from dinner somewhere that required a reservation. I stared at him. “How do you know where I live.” “You’re still my wife.” He looked past me into the house briefly then back at my face. “Can I come in.” “No.” He nodded like he’d expected that and stayed exactly where he was. “You look terrible.” “Go home Alfred.” “I just want to talk.” “We have nothing to talk about.” I started to close the door and he put one hand flat against it, not hard, not forcing anything, just stopping it. “Five minutes,” he said. “That’s all.” I looked at hi

EvelynI knocked three times and waited.The building was the one I had watched her walk out of the day we met. I had been too gutted that afternoon to think straight but my eyes had filed it away anyway, the entrance she disappeared through with Tobias on her hip, the street, the number above the door.I came back today and worked my way through every door I could find. First floor. Second floor. A woman in a yellow headwrap on the third told me ground floor, third from the end.I knocked three times and waited.The door opened.Camille’s face fell the second she registered who was standing there like something behind her eyes switched off all at once.Behind her at the kitchen table a man sat with a cup in his hand, leaned all the way back in his chair, legs stretched out, shoes off.My stomach dropped.“Mrs. Cole.” She gripped the door edge. “I wasn’t expecting you.”“I know.” I looked past her at the man then back at her. “Can I come in.”She stepped aside.I walked in and stayed

Evelyn I wore the headscarf again. Margaret had told me not to come. Same speech, different day. Your presence complicates things, Alfred’s lawyers will use it, stay home, let me work. I had listened to every word and driven there anyway. The public gallery was half full by the time I slipped in through the back and found the furthest corner seat, headscarf pulled low, sunglasses on, bag in my lap. I sat down and kept my head forward and my hands still and told my heart to slow down because it was doing something violent inside my chest that had nothing to do with the room temperature. He wasn’t in yet. Alfred’s lawyers were already at their table. Three of them. Briggs in the centre, Carr on his left, the third one whose name I still didn’t know on his right with his hands folded and his eyes doing a slow sweep of the room. I dropped my chin slightly. Margaret was at the other table alone, her back straight, a fresh stack of files in front of her. She had called me at six th