All Chapters of The Governor’s Wife, His beautiful ruin: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

Evelyn It had been two days since Theo was released and I still hadn’t decided if I was ready to face him.Two days of picking up my phone and putting it down. Two days of standing in front of my wardrobe staring at nothing. Two days of telling myself tomorrow, just one more day, just until I figured out what to say and how to say it and how to walk into a room and look at a man you failed and find the words that were big enough to cover it.I woke up on the third morning and got dressed before I could talk myself out of it.I stood at my bedroom window for almost two hours anyway.By the time I got to my car I had rehearsed the speech so many times it had stopped sounding like words. I ran through it at every red light. Adjusted it on the highway. Stripped it back somewhere on the bridge because it was too long and too polished and Theo would see straight through polished.I pulled up outside his mother’s house and sat in the car and ran through it one more time.Still didn’t sound

Evelyn“You don’t get to just show up here.”Nathan was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and his jaw set and he looked so much like Alfred in that moment that it hit me somewhere tender and unexpected.“Nathan…”“No.” His voice was hard in a way I had never heard from him before. “You left. You packed your things and you left and now you want to just knock on the door like nothing happened?”“I need to talk to you. Both of you.”“There’s nothing to talk about.”“Please.” I held his gaze. “Just let me in. Ten minutes.”He stared at me for a long moment. Then he stepped back.I walked in.The house felt different. Smaller somehow. Or maybe I was just seeing it clearly for the first time without the performance of living in it colouring everything. The flowers on the console table were fresh. Alfred had someone keeping it up. Of course he did.Clara was on the couch.She looked up when I walked in and whatever I had hoped to find in her face wasn’t there. No relief to see me

EvelynThe conference room at Margaret’s firm was neutral ground, or at least that was the intention. Clean lines, a long table, two chairs on each side, a water jug in the middle that nobody was going to touch. Margaret had chosen it deliberately, a space that belonged to neither of them, a space where the only language spoken was supposed to be legal and transactional and stripped of everything personal.I had agreed to it because Margaret asked me to. Because she had explained patiently that this was how civilised divorces began, with paperwork and lawyers and a table between two people who had run out of road, and that walking in composed and prepared was the best weapon I had.I had nodded and told her she was right.I had not told her that sitting across a table from Alfred Cole and discussing the terms of dismantling our marriage while Theo was lying in a hospital bed with a bullet wound in his shoulder was going to require every single thing I had.Alfred was already there whe

EvelynMargaret was already on her feet when I walked in, phone in one hand, a printed transcript in the other.“Sit down,” she said.“I don’t want to sit.”“Evelyn.”“I was sitting in that hospital room holding his hand.” My bag hit the chair beside me. “I watched her do it on a television screen and before she finished her second sentence half the nursing staff had their phones out.” My hands came flat on the edge of her desk. “She sat in our living room. In that armchair. And she took everything I gave to that marriage and arranged it into the most devastating version of me she could construct and delivered it to the whole country with wet eyes and a soft voice.”Margaret put the transcript down.“I know,” she said.“She called me a drunk.”“She implied…”“She told the whole country my children suffered because of me.” My throat tightened and I pressed my lips together and breathed through it. “That Alfred spent years protecting them from me. That I was absent and angry and falling

Evelyn I couldn’t back down now. Couldn’t sit in my house drowning in self-pity while Alfred dismantled my life piece by piece. I grabbed my phone and did the one thing Margaret had warned me never to do. I went live. My hands trembled as I opened TikTok, fumbling through the app with fingers that felt clumsy and foreign. Clara had shown me how to use it once, laughing at how long it took me to understand something she did without thinking. I hadn’t paid enough attention then. Now I jabbed at buttons until the camera flipped to face me and a red recording indicator blinked in the corner. Live. I scrutinized my own reflection in the screen for a moment. Dark circles carved beneath my eyes. Hair that hadn’t seen a brush in two days. The face of a woman who had been holding herself together with nothing but sheer stubbornness for longer than she could remember. I squared my shoulders, lifted my chin, and started talking. I told them everything. Every secret I had buried for the sa