All Chapters of He Wants Me More After Divorce: Chapter 301 - Chapter 310

Karl’s POVThe paper was so old it felt like cloth in my hands—soft at the edges, the fibers loosened by years of folding and unfolding, the ink faded to a washed-out gray that made me squint to read it.I unfolded it carefully, one crease at a time, half expecting the thing to tear along the worn lines. It held. The full front page spread open on my lap, covering the evidence folder underneath.The date sat below the masthead. Twenty-eight years ago. A Thursday in November.The article was short.Four columns wide, maybe twelve inches of copy, with a photograph that had degraded to near-abstraction—a terraced street, police tape across a front door, the blurred shape of an officer standing beside it.The street could have been anywhere. Small houses, parked cars, a wheelie bin visible at the edge of the frame.I read it from the top.The headline in full: DAVID EMERSON, 34, FOUND DEAD IN HOME.The first paragraph gave the address—a house on Garner Road, a street I didn’t know in a to

Claire’s POVHe was younger than I’d expected, with the kind of tiredness that sits behind the eyes rather than on the face.His scrub cap was still on, blue fabric bunched slightly above his left ear. He had a clipboard but he wasn’t looking at it.“Mrs. Emerson?”“Yes,” I said, and I put the cold tea on the table beside the magazines.He sat down in the chair across from me, which I didn’t like—when doctors sit down it means the conversation is going to take longer than a sentence, and longer than a sentence at five in the morning rarely means good things.“Your son is out of surgery,” he began. “He’s stable.”“Tell me the specifics,” I said.He glanced at his clipboard. “Fractured left arm—a clean break of the radius. We’ve set it and cast it. Three broken ribs on the left side, which we’re managing conservatively. Twelve sutures across his forehead, here to here—” He drew a line across his own forehead with one finger, temple to temple, slightly above the brow. “And a concussion.”

Lyndsey’s POVMom’s heels hit the corridor floor in two sharp clicks per step. I heard her before the door opened—unhurried, evenly spaced, a woman who had never rushed for anything and wasn’t about to start now.She came in already moving. The thermos went on the tray table. Something that smelled like ginger cutting through the stale recycled air of the room.The cashmere wrap came open in her hands, dove gray, and she draped it across my shoulders without asking, smoothing the fabric over my collarbones, adjusting the fold at the back of my neck with two fingers.“You look terrible,” she said pleasantly.“Thank you, Mother.”“The bags under your eyes could carry shopping.” She stepped back, examined me, adjusted the wrap again. “Are you eating?”“I was up at four pumping colostrum into a plastic bottle for a baby I’ve held once,” I said tiredly. “Eating wasn’t exactly the priority.”Mom unscrewed the thermos cap and poured. She set the cap on the tray table beside my water jug.“Dr

Estelle’s POVI reached across the bed before my eyes were open. My hand landed on cold sheet.I yanked it back, rolled over, and lay there staring at the ceiling. My arm sat across my stomach where I’d pulled it, fingers still curled from gripping nothing.I’d memorized his warmth in one night and my body was already searching for it at 6:14 in the morning.I grabbed my phone. Empty screen.My message from yesterday sitting there, delivered but unanswered.No typing indicator.Nothing.I’d told him to leave. I’d given him two speeches about love not being enough, slept with him between both of them, cried into his neck, and let him walk out my front door.And now I was checking my phone before sunrise.I dropped it face-down on the mattress and got up.The shower was too hot. I turned the handle and stepped in and the water scalded my shoulder. I didn’t adjust it. I stood there and let it burn because the burning had a location and a cause, which was more than I could say for anythin

Estelle’s POVThree days since we last saw each other. Still nothing.I did the whole thing again. Clinic, patients, school run, dinner, bedtime. The routine was a cage and I was grateful for the bars because bars meant structure and structure meant I didn’t have to decide anything.I checked my phone eleven times. I counted because counting gave me something to be angry at myself about, and anger was easier than the other thing.Eleven times in ten hours.Once per hour, roughly, except for the two-to-three-o’clock stretch when I checked it three times in forty minutes because Chloe had asked about Harrison at pickup and the question had rattled loose something in my chest that wouldn’t settle back down.I could understand him not texting me. I’d ended it. I’d said the words, drawn the line, delivered the verdict.Fine. I could absorb that.I’d asked for this silence and now I had it and it was excruciating but it was mine.But Lucas.Harrison had not asked about Lucas in two days. Ha