All Chapters of He Wants Me More After Divorce: Chapter 311 - Chapter 320

Karl’s POVMy kitchen table looked like something from a crime documentary that had lost the plot halfway through and started pulling in subplots from three different cases.The newspaper sat in the center—twenty-eight years old, yellow, cracking at every fold, DAVID EMERSON, 34, FOUND DEAD IN HOME staring up at me in faded ink.To its left, the color photos of the snake curled in my parents’ freezer inside a takeaway container.To its right, two bent nails sealed in labeled plastic bags.The timeline I’d printed—three pages, single-spaced, annotated in my own handwriting with times and dates and question marks—spread out below everything else.I’d been sitting here for over an hour.My coffee went cold and I drank it cold because getting up to microwave it felt like a commitment. The mug sat empty beside the newspaper now, a brown ring marking where I’d set it down on a blank corner of the timeline.I picked up my phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.I’d thought about calling Este

Estelle’s POVThrough the glass I could see everything.Harrison was flat on his back, the cast on his left arm running from elbow to fingertips, thick and white against the blue hospital blanket.The stitches across his forehead formed a dark crooked line, black thread pulled tight through swollen skin, and his face was slack in a way I’d never seen it—jaw loose, mouth open, every trace of the man who held himself locked and upright stripped away by whatever they’d given him to keep him under.The monitors beeped in a steady pattern beside his head. An IV line ran from the back of his right hand up to a bag on a pole.Claire sat in the plastic chair on the far side of his bed.She was upright. Her bag was on the floor beside her, zipped, everything in place.She held a book in her lap—the spine was cracked, well-read, her left hand curled around the open pages while her right rested on the arm of the chair. Her lipstick was fresh. Her hair was combed.She looked immaculate.She looke

Karl’s POVThe kitchen table looked like a conspiracy board from a show that had jumped the shark.The newspaper sat in the center—twenty-eight years old, DAVID EMERSON, 34, FOUND DEAD IN HOME—with the snake photos fanned out on one side and the evidence bags on the other. My cold coffee sat on the corner of the timeline, the brown ring it left now a permanent part of the document.I’d been staring at all of it for forty minutes. Forty minutes of sitting in a kitchen chair, alone, with a dead man’s headline staring up at me and the full scope of everything I knew pressing against the inside of my skull like a migraine with an agenda.I picked up my phone.Not Estelle. Not Harrison. I scrolled past both their names.Lyndsey Donovan.She answered on the fifth ring. Her voice was scraped down to the base layer, the voice of someone who’d been awake at 3 AM and hadn’t recovered from it.“What,” she said.“It’s Karl.”“I know it’s Karl. Your name came up on the screen. What do you want?”“

Claire’s POVThe phone rang at half past ten.I was standing at the kitchen counter holding a mug of tea I hadn’t drunk and wouldn’t drink.Staring at the wall the way I’d been staring at things for the past twenty-four hours, at nothing, through nothing.My eyes pointed at surfaces but saw only the corridor outside Room 412 and the click of the door as Estelle dismissed me from my own son’s bedside.Harrison’s name appeared on the screen.I picked up.“Mother.”His voice was wrong. Not angry—I knew angry, I could handle angry, I’d built an entire life around handling angry.This was something else.It was distant.A voice delivered from the far side of something that couldn’t be crossed back over.“Harrison,” I said. “How are you feeling? Did the nurse—”“I know about the photograph.”My hand tightened on the mug. The ceramic was cold against my fingers.“Lyndsey called,” he continued in that same flat register. “An hour ago. She told me everything. You sitting at the computer. Choos

Harrison’s POVThe elevator doors opened and Estelle pushed the wheelchair forward before I could argue about it again.“I can walk,” I said for the fourth time.“You can barely stand. The nurse said wheelchair to the car.”“The nurse doesn’t know me.”“The nurse watched you try to put your shoes on for twelve minutes. She knows plenty.”I shut my mouth. She had a point about the shoes. The laces had defeated me completely—one hand in a cast, the other shaking from three days of sedation withdrawal—and Estelle had finally knelt down and tied them herself while I sat on the edge of the hospital bed feeling like a child being dressed for school.The main entrance slid open and the afternoon hit me. Cold air and gray sky. The particular quality of daylight that exists only outside hospitals. Too bright after days of artificial everything.Estelle’s car was parked in the first row. She opened the passenger door and I hauled myself up from the wheelchair using the doorframe, my ribs protes