Lahat ng Kabanata ng He Wants Me More After Divorce: Kabanata 291 - Kabanata 300

Harrison’s POVI stared into Estelle’s sleeping face with her breathing against my chest and her hand curled loosely against my sternum.At some point she’d fallen asleep. Not deeply—her breathing was too fast for deep sleep, and her eyelids twitched, and every few minutes her fingers would flex against my skin as if she were reaching for something in a dream.I slid out from under her arm carefully. She stirred but didn’t wake. I pulled the sheet up over her shoulder and tucked it around her the way I used to, years ago, in our old bedroom, before everything.I got dressed in the dark. The shirt was wrinkled beyond help and two of the buttons had been pulled loose, so I held the front together with one hand while I found my jacket on the floor and shrugged it on.Then I went to the children’s room.The door was cracked open. I pushed it wider, just enough to step through, and stood in the doorway.Lucas was on the cushion pile on the floor, curled on his right side, Chloe’s borrowe

Karl’s POVThe desk sergeant had a face built for patience. Wide-set eyes, soft jaw, the kind of expression that could absorb anything you threw at it and return exactly the same look.I’d been talking for four minutes.I knew because the clock on the wall behind him had a second hand that I couldn’t stop tracking, and four minutes of explaining a snake on a doorstep to a man who clearly thought I was wasting his time felt closer to forty.“So let me just make sure I’ve got this right,” he said, spreading my photographs across the counter between us. He picked up the snake photo, tilted it toward the overhead light, squinted. “You’re saying someone deliberately placed this…animal…on your parents’ front step.”“It’s not native to the area,” I said. “A retired veterinarian identified it as a juvenile viper and said it’s possibly imported. You can buy them online without any paperwork.”“Right.” He set the photo down. “And the nails.”I pulled the labeled plastic bags from my folder and

Karl’s POVI stayed one more night.My mother packed leftover shepherd’s pie into a glass container with a blue lid that didn’t quite snap shut on one side, so she wrapped an elastic band around it twice and handed it to me with a look that said the elastic band was non-negotiable and I was not to remove it.“And these,” she said, pressing a paper bag into my other hand. “From the garden. They’re Braeburns. Your father says they’re not ready but they’re ready, I don’t care what he thinks.”“Mom—”“And there’s half a loaf of that sourdough you liked. I froze the other half so don’t let me forget to give it to you next time.”“Mom, I’ll be fine.”“You look thin,” she said, ignoring me completely. “You’re not eating properly, I can tell. You’ve got that look.”“What look?”“The look,” she said, as if that explained everything.She straightened the collar of my coat with both hands, pulling the fabric flat, her fingers moving with the quick competence of someone who’d been straightening c

Karl’s POVI sat on the plastic bench nearest the booking corridor and took out my phone.I held it at an angle—tilted slightly, thumb hovering over the screen—the universal posture of a man reading something boring while waiting.The bench was hard and the plastic was cold through my pants. The folder sat on my lap with its useless photographs and its useless nails and its useless timeline.None of that mattered because ten feet away, a man was being processed for something involving Harrison Emerson and the A-road and last night.The processing window was separated from the lobby by a waist-high partition and a pane of reinforced glass that stopped about two feet short of the ceiling.Sound carried.Not cleanly—the words arrived broken, half-swallowed by the ambient noise of the station—but enough.“—just need you to walk us through it one more time, from the beginning,” one of the officers said.She had a clipboard and she was clicking a pen, the same clicking that the other office

Karl’s POVI didn’t leave the station.Not immediately. Not for another twenty minutes, actually, which I spent on that plastic bench with the folder balanced on my knees and the leaflet about the Independent Office for Police Conduct crumpled in my jacket pocket beside the locksmith’s card.I should have left.There was nothing more to hear—the man, Thomas, was behind the reinforced door in an interview room, and whatever he was telling them wasn’t going to carry through two walls and a corridor to a plastic bench in the lobby.But I couldn’t stand up.The heavy-set officer had gone back to his crossword. The tracksuit man had finished his form and left.A teenager came in to report a stolen bicycle, gave a description that included “sort of blue, kind of,” and was handed yet another leaflet.I sat in the middle of it and replayed what I’d heard.I was keeping an eye on him. For his own good.His mother knows why.His mother. Claire.The woman who’d sat at a table eight years ago and