He Wants Me More After Divorce のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 211 - チャプター 220

Estelle’s POVI flinched.Not a small reaction—my whole body jerked back against the sofa as if she had thrown the words across the room.“You just explained exactly why he can’t do it,” Daisy continued quietly. “She raised him alone. She built everything from nothing. She went hungry so he didn’t have to. You said all of that yourself.”She leaned back slightly, watching me. “You understand him perfectly, Estelle,” she added. “You just can’t accept it yet.”“Understanding someone’s reasons doesn’t mean I have to be okay with them.”“No,” she agreed calmly. “It doesn’t. But it might mean you stop treating it as a betrayal.”“It is a betrayal,” I snapped. “She stole my son and he’s choosing—”“He’s choosing not to destroy her,” Daisy cut in. “That’s different from choosing her over you.”“Is it?” I demanded hotly.I pushed to my feet again, the motion sharp enough that the wine sloshed against the rim of the glass.“Because from where I’m standing it looks exactly the same,” I continue

Karl’s POVI was at my desk at seven because the office was the only place that didn’t feel contaminated by my own choices.The building was quiet. Cleaning carts rattled faintly somewhere down the hall. My computer screen glowed in the dim office while the first gray light crept through the windows.The phone rang. Unknown number.Normally I would have ignored it, but something in me snapped toward the noise. I grabbed the receiver before the second ring finished.“Karl, don’t hang up,” Lyndsey blurted immediately. “Please—just don’t hang up.”I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling tiles.“How did you get this number?” I asked flatly.“That doesn’t matter. Listen to me—”“It matters to me, Lyndsey.”A sharp breath came through the line. “I asked my mom, okay? Which is—actually that’s part of what I need to talk to you about.”Her words rushed out in uneven bursts. This wasn’t the cool, calculated Lyndsey I knew. The sentences stumbled over each other.“Harrison found eve

Lyndsey’s POVI had been back in my childhood bedroom for three days, and the walls were starting to close in.Not the Curzon Lane flat, the one with the narrow view of Harrison’s building two streets away. That place was gone now. Greaves’s people had cleared it out in an afternoon after I’d called my mother and asked for help because I’d been rotting.My mother sent a car. I packed what I could carry and left the rest.Now I was here.The Donovan house where I’d grown up riding horses, practicing polite conversation over long dinners, and believing the world would cooperate if I presented myself correctly.My old bedroom looked different now. The horse posters were gone, replaced by botanical prints that probably came from a design catalogue.The single bed had become a queen.But the window still looked over the same paddock. The same chestnut mare wandered near the fence, tail flicking lazily at flies. And the floorboard beside the closet still creaked when I stepped on it.The wh

Lyndsey’s POVI dropped my hands from my face.My mother was looking at me the way she looked at contracts before signing, reading every clause, weighing every risk.“She used you, Lyndsey,” she said quietly. “That doesn’t excuse what you did. But she used you. She took a girl who was desperate for love and she pointed her at the one place that desperation could do the most damage.”“I wasn’t a child,” I whispered. “I knew what I was doing.”“Did you?”“Yes.”“Did you know she was going to steal a baby from a hospital bed?”I flinched hard enough that my back hit the headboard.“No,” I said. “I didn’t know about that until—no. Not at the beginning.”“But later.”“Later. Yes.”“When?”“When she saw Estelle had at the hospital and—she took the baby and told Harrison that Estelle had tried to abort him and then abandoned him. I knew…I knew that wasn’t what happened. I knew because I’d been at the hospital when the arrangements were made, and I’d seen Claire—”I stopped. I pressed my fist

Harrison’s POVMother moved from topic to topic without pause, but nothing she said touched the real reason I was sitting at her table.For twenty more minutes I let it happen.Her voice filled the kitchen in the same way I had known my entire life. It moved through the room easily, the way it always had. Certain that the world made sense if you managed it properly.I wrapped my hands around the blue mug and let the warmth sink into my palms.Sitting there, listening to her talk about ordinary things, I understood something quietly devastating.I was saying goodbye to this kitchen.She stood and walked to the shelves behind the counter. Dozens of books sat in neat rows. She kept them arranged by subject, labels titles forward like a display in a shop window. One book had shifted slightly out of line.She nudged it back into place.“You know,” she said casually, her back still turned, “it’s a shame about Estelle’s family.”I didn’t speak.“I mean—they tried, I’m sure,” she continued. “