Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 141 - Chapitre 150

Harrison’s POVI waited until Lucas left for Tommy’s house on Saturday morning, watched his friend’s mother’s car pull out of the driveway, and then I went to find my mother.She was in the sitting room, reading a cup of tea on the side table, looking exactly the way she always looked—composed, elegant, untouchable.I closed the door behind me and she glanced up from her book. I watched her register something in my face because she set the book down slowly and straightened in her chair.“When was Lucas born?” I asked flatly.“April 14th,” she answered smoothly. “Why are you asking?”I pulled both birth certificates from inside my jacket and laid them on the coffee table between us. Lucas’s on the left, Chloe’s school medical records on the right.Mother’s eyes moved from the papers to my face and back to the papers, and she went very still—not dramatically, not obviously, just a subtle freezing of every small movement, her fingers pausing mid-air above her teacup.“Did you know Estelle

Estelle’s POVThe park was my idea. I suggested it too brightly, too cheerfully, overcompensating so badly that Chloe just looked at me and nodded without any expression at all.She got dressed slowly. No arguing about which outfit, no changing three times, no spinning in front of the mirror—just pulled on whatever was closest and stood by the door waiting.Other children ran and shrieked and chased each other across the grass but Chloe just sat on the bench next to me watching them, her hands folded in her lap, her feet dangling.“Don’t you want to go play, baby? The swings are free.”“I don’t want to play without Lucas,” she said flatly. “Everything is better with Lucas. Nothing is fun without him.”We left after twenty minutes because watching her sit there was worse than being home. In the car she stared out the window and tears ran down her face and she didn’t bother wiping them away, just let them drip off her chin onto her shirt.“Do you want ice cream?” I tried desperately. “We

Estelle’s POVDinner was a disaster dressed up in fairy lights and white tablecloths.Chloe sat between Karl and me picking apart a piece of grilled chicken she’d normally devour, separating it into smaller and smaller shreds and rearranging them on her plate without lifting a single one to her mouth.“See those kids over there?” Karl said brightly, pointing toward a table where three children were giggling and throwing chips at each other. “Looks like they’re having a food fight. Bet we could take them.”Chloe glanced over and looked back at her plate. “Yeah,” she said quietly.Karl tried again. “So tomorrow I was thinking we could try the water slide first thing, before it gets crowded. And then maybe kayaking? Have you ever been in a kayak, Chloe?”“No.”“It’s brilliant. You sit in this little boat and you paddle and sometimes you go really fast and sometimes you just float. You’d love it.”“Okay,” Chloe said, and pushed a piece of chicken to the far edge of her plate.Karl caught m

Estelle’s POVChloe’s bedroom door creaked open and she wandered out rubbing sleep from her eyes, her hair a tangled mess, still in her pyjamas.“What’s for breakfast?” she asked groggily.I shoved Karl’s phone back at him so fast I nearly dropped it and forced my face into something that probably looked deranged but was the closest I could manage to a smile.“We can order room service, sweetheart. Anything you want.”That got a small spark of interest—the novelty of a phone on the nightstand that summoned food—and Chloe climbed onto the sofa and pulled the leather-bound menu onto her lap and started reading through it with the first bit of focus I’d seen in days.“Can I get pancakes AND eggs?” she asked hopefully.“You can get whatever you like, baby.”While Chloe deliberated between scrambled and fried, I excused myself to the bathroom and turned on the shower and stood under the water and fell completely apart.I slid down the tile wall and sat on the floor and cried so hard my whol

Harrison’s POVThe new paediatrician’s office smelled l nothing like Estelle’s clinic, and Lucas knew it the second we walked through the door.His face just fell. He stopped in the middle of the waiting room and looked up at me and his eyes were already filling.“Where’s Dr. Estelle?”“We talked about this, buddy. You’re seeing a different doctor now.”“But I don’t want a different doctor,” he said desperately, grabbing my sleeve. “Can we please go back to Dr. Estelle? Please, Dad? I like her better, she knows all my stuff already, she knows exactly how to—”“We can’t, Lucas.”He shut down completely after that. Sat in the examination chair and answered the new doctor’s questions in monosyllables—yes, no, fine, okay—his feet dangling, his eyes fixed on the wall, his whole body rigid and closed off.The summer stretched out in front of us and Chloe’s absence ate through it like. Lucas stopped playing with his toys. Stopped watching his favorite shows. Stopped doing anything except sitt