All Chapters of The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back): Chapter 261 - Chapter 270

289 Chapters

Stronger Than the Lie

HANNAH'S POV:He was quiet for a moment. "I was angry," he said, with the calm specificity he always brought to his own feelings. "I did not say anything because I thought if I said something it was going to be something too big for school and I would get in trouble. So I did not say anything." A pause. "I did not want to get in trouble. But I also did not like it.""You made a good call," Elijah said from the driver's seat. "Being angry and choosing not to act on it in the wrong moment is not weakness either. That is judgment."Andrew considered this seriously. "Okay," he said, in a very similar tone to the one Amelia had used.We did not go home directly.We drove to the park first and the children ran around for forty minutes and I sat on a bench with Elijah beside me and neither of us said very much and that was the right call. Children process things through movement. You cannot sit them down and make them talk through something difficult the moment it happens. You give them room

Still Standing

HANNAH'S POV: "But I am still standing," I said. "And your grandmother Mirada stood up for what was right even when she was frightened and even when she did not have the strength or the time left to fight it herself. She kept the evidence and gave it to someone she trusted and believed it would matter one day." I looked at Amelia and then at Andrew. "We are what happens when she believes that. Both of you, this family, the collection. All of it. We are the thing she trusted the future to deliver." Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Andrew said, from the arm of the bench, "That is a big thing to be." "Yes," I agreed. "It is." "Are we up to it?" he asked. He said it earnestly, he was not worried but he was genuinely asking. I looked at him. This boy who had been asking the real questions since before he had the vocabulary for them. Who had sat in a living room and asked his father are you scared, Dad in the exact same direct way his sister had just asked me. "I think we are,

The Story Continues

ELIJAH'S POV:I watched Hannah on the bench beside me, watching our children on the grass, and I thought about the morning I had stood in the kitchen with my hand on a bottle and the reason I had put it down was partly Jacob and partly the floor being solid under my feet and partly the fact that just before I had walked to that cabinet I had thought about her sleeping upstairs in my shirt with the sound of the twins in the house and the life we were building and I had known immediately that I was not going to throw that away for the weight of a bad morning.She turned to look at me and caught me looking at her."What?" she said."Nothing," I said.She gave me the look that said she knew it was not nothing and was choosing to let me keep it for now."She is going to tell her class about Mirada tomorrow," she said, nodding toward Amelia."Mrs. Obama is going to have her hands very full," I said."Amelia said she is going to ask permission," Hannah said. "Politely. She plans to frame it

Who Is Sam?

LUCAS'S POV:I found out because of Andrew.Which was, honestly, one of the more humbling ways a grown man could find out that his fiance had been keeping a secret from him. I had been at Hannah and Elijah's house for dinner. It was one of those comfortable evenings that had become a regular thing over the past year. Hannah was in the kitchen with Elijah. Andrew was doing homework at the table. Amelia was conducting some kind of investigation into whether the cat next door could be trained to come when called, which seemed optimistic but I had learned not to underestimate Amelia.My phone rang.I answered it without really looking at the screen because I was in the middle of telling Elijah something and I was multitasking, which I am normally excellent at. It was Martin. I said hello, hang on one second, and then got distracted trying to finish the thought I was mid-way through with Elijah, so I had the phone pressed against my ear but I was not quite listening.And then I heard Marti

The Secret Between Us

LUCAS'S POV:I thought about the proposal. Martin on one knee in the backyard while the fireworks went off and everyone we loved was screaming and Cherry had her phone light on like we were at a concert. I had said yes before he finished the sentence. I had cried ugly happy tears all over his suit.And this whole time. This whole entire time."You should have told me," I said. "Before the proposal and before any of it. You should have told me.""I know," he said. "You are right. I know.""But you did not," I said."No," he said. "I did not."I stood up because I needed to do something with my body and staying on that sofa was not an option anymore. I walked to the window and stood there looking at the street below and I thought about all the times something had felt slightly off and I had told myself I was being paranoid. The relationship paranoia that people who have been hurt before develop and spend years trying to talk themselves out of.I had talked myself out of it. And I had ac

The Space Between Us

LUCAS'S POV: "I know," I said. "That is what makes this complicated." And that was the state of things for weeks after. Me in my flat, Martin in his, the relationship sitting in some undefined territory with no good name. I kept myself moving. I threw myself into work, into the Prestige legal prep, into Lucas things, because Lucas things were something I was excellent at and being excellent was a good place to hide when you did not want to feel what you were feeling. Then came the beach house trip. Hannah had bought a beach house in St Louisiana a few months back, which she had done without telling anyone including her husband, which was the most Hannah thing I had ever heard of and I had found it so funny at the time. She invited everyone for two weeks and I had said yes before I remembered that Martin had also been invited and that this was going to be exactly as awkward as it sounded. It was. We were both there. We were both very good at pretending we were fine. Elijah and J

James

MARTIN'S POV:I knew, even while I was doing it, that not telling Lucas about Sam was wrong. I knew it every single day. I rehearsed the conversation so many times. I had versions for every occasion. The casual version, the serious version, the version where I did it over dinner and the version where I waited until we were alone on a quiet evening. I rehearsed all of them. In every rehearsal Lucas was understanding because Lucas is a person who understands things. In every rehearsal it went fine.Rehearsals do not come with stakes.The real conversation has a face across from it. A face you love. And the terror of watching that face in the moment it receives something you have been holding back is not something that exists in a rehearsal.I was a coward. I am prepared to say that plainly and own it.But I also need to explain James.James Osei was my best friend since we were seventeen years old.We met in high school at a football match where we had both been supporting the team that

Go To Him

MARTIN'S POV:I have thought a lot about why I did not just tell him.The honest answer is that when you love someone enough that the thought of losing them changes the temperature of the room, you start making decisions from that fear instead of from your actual judgment. And fear is a terrible decision-maker. Fear told me that Lucas would see Sam as a complication. Fear told me he would look at what I was carrying and decide it was more than he signed up for. Fear told me to wait for the right moment and the right moment kept not arriving and then he was saying yes to my proposal in Hannah and Elijah's backyard with fireworks going off and everyone we loved screaming, and I still had not found the right moment.I had planned to tell him after the engagement. I genuinely had. I had a whole plan. We would settle into the engagement for a few weeks, let the joy of it land properly, and then I would sit him down and explain everything about James and Sam and Dorothy and the promise I ha

We Try Again

LUCAS'S POV:He called me on a Thursday evening.I almost did not answer. I had been managing the not-talking-to-Martin situation reasonably well, which meant I was thinking about him approximately forty times a day instead of seventy, so progress.I answered."I need to tell you something," he said. "The full story, please and not the version from before because I left something important out and you deserve the whole truth.""Okay," I said.He told me about James.He talked for a long time and I sat on the sofa where we had spent so many evenings together and I listened without saying anything. About the friendship that had started at a football match. About fourteen years and what they looked like. About the diagnosis and the months that followed. About the last conversation and the promise. About the years of showing up for a little boy and a grieving grandmother because his best friend had asked him to and he had said yes because he loved his best friend and that was the right th

Forgiveness First

LUCAS'S POV: Martin lived one hour or more from me. He opened the door and we looked at each other and neither of us said anything for a moment. Which was probably not the smoothest beginning to an important conversation but it was what happened and I was going to own it. "I owe you an apology," I said. He blinked. "You owe me an apology." "You kept something from me and that was wrong and I have dealt with that part already," I said. "But I spent weeks deciding what kind of man you were without letting you tell me the full story. And the full story is that you made a promise to your dying best friend kept it and I called you a fool in my head approximately eight hundred times without knowing any of that. So yes. I owe you an apology." Martin was very still. "Also," I said, "I should have called you the next day and asked you to finish. I chose to protect myself instead and that was not fair to you." "Lucas," he said. "I am not done," I said. "I love you. I was always going t

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