บททั้งหมดของ The Return Of The Discarded Billionaire Ex-Wife: บทที่ 161 - บทที่ 170

Silas's POVThe summer week at the family home was the largest it had ever been.Clara and I. Eleanor and Edmund. Luke. Cassie and James and Ellie, who was eight months old and had decided that Edmund was her favorite person, a judgment Edmund received with complete seriousness and fulfilled by spending a considerable amount of time sitting on the floor near her mat with his notebooks open and narrating his investigations in a calm voice that she found soothing.Adrian came for four days. Nick and Lydia came for two, with Luke already there, which produced a particular quality of conversation among the three of them that required the rest of us to simply watch and appreciate.Priya Datta came for a day. She had become a fixture of these occasions not as a journalist, never as a journalist when she was here, but as someone Clara had come to trust completely over the years of working together.The long table was extended for the first time.On the third evening when the table had this

Clara's POVEdmund was eleven when he stood at the hills for the first time with intention.Not for the first time physically. He had been coming here since he was born. But there was a morning when I watched him walk to the wall alone, without anyone telling him to, without any particular occasion, and put both hands on the stone and look at the hills with the specific quality of someone doing something they understand.Eleanor was behind me in the library. I was in the doorway between the library and the garden and I watched Edmund at the wall.He stayed there for five minutes.Then he came back.He saw me watching.“The hills are the same," he said.“Yes," I said.“Every time we come," he said. "The hills are the same. I have been documenting them for three years now. Geologically they are changing but too slowly to observe in three years. To observation they are the same."“Yes," I said."That is useful," he said. "When a lot of other things are changing."He had been at a new sch

Eleanor's POVThe commission came from a school.Beacon Hills Primary had a problem that had been a problem for eleven years. Their outdoor learning space was unusable for eight months of the year because the drainage was wrong and the surface material was wrong and the shelter was in the wrong position relative to the prevailing wind direction.The head teacher had applied for funding three times. Each time the funding had been approved and each time the design that resulted from it had not solved the fundamental problems.I heard about it from Mrs. Bright, who was Ellie's childminder three days a week and whose nephew attended Beacon Hills.I asked to see the space.She arranged it.I went with Edmund on a Saturday morning. He brought two notebooks. I brought my current project notebook and a soil probe.We spent two hours there.Edmund found the drainage problem in forty minutes. It was not complex. The space had been designed with a slope running toward the building rather than aw

Silas's POVThe library had become the heart of the family home.Not by design. By accumulation. The room had shelves to the ceiling and a floor space that Edmund had colonized with his investigation methodology and a desk that Eleanor had claimed and a reading chair that was specifically Clara's and a second chair near the window that was mine.On Sunday mornings at the family home the library held all four of us simultaneously and had done for years.Edmund on the floor. Eleanor at her desk. Clara in her chair. Me in mine.The specific sound of four people working in the same room was something I had not known I would come to love. Not silence. Not conversation. Something between them. The breathing sound of thinking.On this particular Sunday Eleanor had a call with Adrian about the school commission. Edmund was cross-referencing his soil notebooks with aerial survey data on his tablet. Clara was reading something for the foundation's advisory role.I was reading a biography of a b

Clara's POVThe school commission completed in eight weeks.The outdoor learning space at Beacon Hills Primary had its drainage corrected, its surface material replaced, its shelter repositioned. Eleanor had specified everything. Edmund had provided the soil analysis for the material selection. The local contractor had followed the specification precisely because Eleanor had visited the site twice during construction and had been precise about deviations.The head teacher sent me a photograph on the day the space reopened.Two hundred children were in it. Running, sitting, building things from the natural materials Eleanor had incorporated into the design. The shelter was full because children always went to the shelter first when it was in the right place. The drainage was moving water away from the building the way water was supposed to move.I showed the photograph to Eleanor.She looked at it for a long moment. Not at the design. At the children.“They are using the shelter," she