All Chapters of The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back): Chapter 291 - Chapter 300

ELIJAH'S POV:The panel chair went through the placings from third upward. Third place was the water filtration project. I watched Andrew register this without any expression on his face. Second place was the light spectrum project. I watched him register this too, still without expression.The results took time. The panel chair went through the categories methodically and there were several before Life Sciences and Andrew waited through all of them without fidgeting.I watched him while he waited. He was watching the panel and reading their faces, not anxiously but with the data-gathering attention he brought to everything. At one point he leaned slightly toward me and said, very quietly, "The grey-haired judge spoke more extensively about the projects she responded to. I counted the questions." I looked at him. "She asked me three questions," he said. "She asked the other projects one or two." He said this without triumph. Just as information."How many questions did the other judge

HANNAH'S POV: "My project is about sleep and bacteria," Andrew said. "Which is not about her directly. But she is the reason our family has been through everything it has been through, which is the reason I was in this competition." He said this with the careful logical sequence of someone who had worked out the chain. "So indirectly she is connected to everything I do." A pause. "Yes," Amelia said. "Of course you can put yours there too." I got up and went to look at the mantelpiece properly. The photograph had been there since Adele had sent us a print, a few months ago now, and it had become part of the room. She slid off her stool and went to the mantelpiece where the framed photograph of Mirada lived, the one from Adele's album that we had printed and framed, the one where she was smiling in the full warm way of someone in the middle of being happy. Amelia set her trophy beside it. Came back for Andrew's certificate. "Andrew should put his," I said. He got down from his st

ANDREW'S POV:"Good," she said. "I was hoping for that answer."We agreed to not discuss our arguments with each other until the debate itself, which was in two weeks. This was Amelia's suggestion and it was a good one. If we compared notes we would spend the whole time arguing at home instead of building our real cases, and our parents would have to live through both the preparation and the competition, which was already going to be a lot for them.* * * * * * *I approached the preparation the way I approached everything.First I read everything I could find about the debate between rule-based ethics and emotion-based ethics, which led me into a body of philosophy I had not properly encountered before and which was significantly more interesting than I had expected. There was a philosopher named Kant who argued that rules were the only reliable basis for moral action because they could be applied universally without depending on individual circumstance. There was another philosophe

AMELIA'S POV:I then practiced the argument three times in front of my mirror, which I know sounds like the most dramatic possible thing to do but mirrors do not lie about whether you are convincing and I needed to know if I was convincing. The first run-through was too much in my head. I was thinking about the logic while I was saying it and the thinking showed. The second run-through was better. The third one felt right.Mum came past my room on the third run-through and stood in the doorway for a moment without saying anything and I did not stop because stopping breaks the momentum. When I finished she said, "The ending is right. The middle needs to be slower." I said I knew. She said, "Then make it slower." I said I would. She left.Becca came over one afternoon for a practice session and argued the affirmative against me, which she had been briefed to do, and she was a good enough debater to push me in the right places. There was one point she made that I did not have an immediat

ANDREW'S POV:Oliver made the foundational argument. Rules exist to protect everyone equally. Feelings are individual and variable. What I feel is not the same as what you feel and if we each act on our own feelings without the framework of shared rules we end up in conflict, not community. He gave examples. He was good. He sat down.Then the first speaker for the negative stood up.It was not Amelia. She was their closing speaker, which was the most important position, the one that had to pull everything together and leave the last impression on the judges. The negative's first speaker was a girl named Priya from the year above who was very confident and who opened by asking the room a question."Can anyone tell me," she said, "what it feels like to be treated fairly?"She paused and let the room sit with it."You can feel it," she said. "You know it in your body when you have been treated fairly and you know it in your body when you have not. And that feeling, that sense of justice