Semua Bab My Precocious Triplets Brought me a Husband For Christmas : Bab 31 - Bab 40

The email came in at 6:42 a.m. Not loud. Not urgent. Not even labeled important. It half pushed, slid and rolled into her inbox with the quiet confidence of something that just assumed it was going to be read at some point. Stephanie only spotted it because she was awake earlier than usual. She lay very still in bed for a moment, listening to the house breathe, pipes ticking softly, a distant hum from the refrigerator, the faint shift of Peter beside her as he turned in his sleep. His hand lay at her waist, loose, unguarded. Trusting. That was still new. She reached for her phone without moving the rest of her body. Old habit. Lawyer reflex. The need to check before the world gets the jump on her. The subject line read: International Compliance Notice, Review in Progress. Her thumb stilled. She told herself it meant nothing. Banks sent those all the time. Automated systems flagged things constantly, duplicate charges, expired credentials, dormant accounts roused by paperwork errors. S

Stephanie could tell the first thing that was off: how her office felt so quiet when she showed up.Not serene, but quiet as a room becomes when sound has just exited it. As if someone had been uttering something right before she walked through the door, and the walls were still debating on whether to hold onto the secret.She stopped on the threshold, fingers still clutching the knob, listening.Nothing.The city hummed softly through the glass. Traffic. Voices. Life moving along, a safe, disinterested distance.She went in and closed the door behind her.Last night hung on her in pieces. Peter’s arm around her waist, the solid reassurance of his presence, the way she’d promised, honestly, that she’d tell him if something was wrong. She had meant it.She still did.But as she’d come to know over years of litigation, truth was seldom a single thing in truth. It came in stages. Sometimes it had to be handled before it could be shared. Stephanie set down her bag and booted up her compu

Sound came first.Not a single sound, not a clean one but layers crashing atop one another, they were jagged, overlapping, indistinct. A shriek of metal coming apart at the seams. A low, bone-rattling thump. Then something else beneath it all, constant and numbingly endless.Water.It bellowed like a living thing, devouring everything else.Martins didn’t know his name then. He didn’t know where he was or why his body felt so wrong... so heavy, so light, as if suspended and crushed all at once. Consciousness sputtered like a faulty bulb, flashing in and out in agonizing intervals.Noise.Then pressure.Then silence, so profound it was like dying, really dying.His eyes fluttered open.Darkness. Not the fluffy type. The kind that squeezed.Something slammed into his shoulder. Pain flared, sharp enough to tear a sound from his throat, though he couldn’t hear it over the scream of everything else. His head snapped forward, then back, vision exploding into white.The plane was no longer a

In a cramped hospital room, the television popped: it was on a rolling cart, high enough off the floor that Martins could see it with just a slight turn of his head. The nurse adjusting the monitors had quietly left it behind, providing him with a faint feeling of companionship and the gentle, mechanical drone of machines.A well-known announcer’s voice pierced the silence like a knife.“…tragic plane crash this morning near the coast... Initial reports indicate there are many dead. Emergency workers are still there. Families are being notified…”Sleepy and pained, Martins’ blurry eyes locked on to the screen. He saw the images first: crushed cars, the charred remnants of a fuselage nestled against a foggy-gray ocean spray, rescuers extracting bodies, a few that were barely identifiable. The tape rolled with savage regularity, unmoved by the reports of death and injury.“…among the dead confirmed is our colleague, Martins Hogwarts, passenger on Flight 917,” the anchor read. "He has b

He woke with her name already in his mouth.Not spoken, never spoken but felt beneath the surface of his mouth behind the teeth as a prayer hides behind folded hands. That hospital room was so dark, and the early morning light was straining to find its way through the curtains. Martins lay motionless, one hand on his chest, the other loosely balled at his side. His bones ached in all the usual places, but it was the ache in his mind that kept him frozen.Stephanie.She didn't come in quietly, thinking of her. It came in layers with noise, with waves of movement, with colour. Her laugh... Always her laugh. It had surprised him the first time he heard it years ago, because it was broader than he expected, unguarded, a laugh that belonged to a man who didn’t hold back joy even when life asked for it. He can still hear her laughter: faint and echoing, distorted by distance and time, but unmistakably hers.He closed his eyes.The recollection moved around.A kitchen, more compact than the