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Home / Romance / Cruel Love Back in His Hands / Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

All Chapters of Cruel Love Back in His Hands : Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

148 Chapters

Chapter 132

She was seventy-one, sharp-eyed, and moved through the world with the efficiency of someone who had raised a doctor alone and regarded unnecessary sentimentality as a misuse of available time. George collected her from the airport and Kristine stayed at the apartment because Sandra had specifically requested to arrive and see the home first, before any restaurant or organised plan, because home was where you understood people.She walked in.She looked around the apartment slowly and without comment — the furniture, the books, the evidence of two people who had built something deliberately. She looked at the photographs on the wall. She looked at Max, who assessed her with professional interest and then decided she was acceptable, which Kristine suspected was the highest endorsement available from that quarter.Then she looked at Kristine.She said: you're taller than I expected.Kristine said: most people say that.Sandra said: George didn't mention it. He described your work, your b

Chapter 133

Not because either of them needed the time exactly, but because less felt rushed in a way that would have produced regret and more felt like waiting past the point where the waiting was about anything useful. Six months gave them a spring wedding. It gave Diana enough runway to be involved without becoming overwhelmed. It gave George's mother time to arrange her travel and her feelings, in that order.The venue question resolved faster than either of them expected.Kristine had one idea she had been keeping quietly in the back of her mind since the engagement — a converted greenhouse event space in Capitol Hill that she had attended a colleague's wedding at two years ago and had not stopped thinking about. Glass ceiling. Plants everywhere. The particular quality of light in the late afternoon that made everything inside it look like it belonged to a different, softer version of the world. She had not said anything because mentioning it felt like presuming and she had been trying not t

Chapter 134

It came through his prison facility's outgoing mail system, which meant it had been reviewed and cleared — not for content that would be stopped, just for contraband. A ten-page letter, handwritten, in Nathan's controlled angular script on the lined paper the facility provided. Addressed to Kristine specifically. Forwarded through his lawyer's office, which was the formal channel, which meant it had been deliberately routed to reach her.She held it for a moment before she opened it.George was at the hospital. She was in the apartment alone with Max. She sat at the kitchen table and looked at the envelope and thought about whether she wanted to read it.She decided yes. Not because she owed him a reading, but because she had learned that knowledge was almost always preferable to the particular unease of something unknown sitting in a drawer. She would read it and she would know what it was and she would decide what to do with it from a position of having seen it.She opened it.The f

Chapter 135

He read it faster than she had. He was looking for the specific thing she had told him about on the phone and he found it in under three minutes and read that section twice.He set it down.He said: he's trying to destabilise you.She said: possibly. Or he knows something.He said: Kristine—She said: think about it. He wrote this in prison. He has no access to current information. The letter was reviewed by the facility before it left. Whatever he knows about Lucy — if he knows anything — he knew it before he was arrested.George was quiet for a moment.She said: I need to talk to Lucy.He said: what are you going to say.She said: I'm going to ask her. Directly. And I'm going to watch her face.She called Lucy the next morning and asked her to come by. She did not say why.Lucy arrived at eleven with two coffees and the natural forward momentum of someone who had not been told to be cautious. She sat on the couch. Max settled at her feet, which he did with people he had approved.Kr

Chapter 136

That was not how these things worked. She knew this from every account she had heard, from Lucy's running commentary on other people's wedding preparations, from the general cultural understanding that finding the dress was a process, a journey, an ordeal that took multiple appointments and several emotional breakdowns before arriving at the correct conclusion.She found it in the second boutique. Second dress she tried.Diana and Lucy were on the velvet bench in the fitting room, which was not large enough for the size of Lucy's opinions but which contained them adequately. The consultant, a woman named Vera who had seen every conceivable reaction to every conceivable dress and had consequently become unflappable, helped Kristine into it and stepped back.The dress was not dramatic. That was the first thing. It did not arrive into the room. It was not covered in anything or structured in ways that required scaffolding. It was silk, ivory, cut simply, with a neckline that was lower th

Chapter 137

Eight men at a table in a restaurant in Belltown — colleagues, old friends, two people from George's residency years who had made the effort to come from out of state. Good wine. Good food. Long conversations that moved through medicine and sport and the specific nostalgia of people who had known each other before they were fully formed.Daniel gave a short toast.He said: I've known George for fifteen years and in that time I have watched him be one of the most competent people I've ever encountered in a professional setting and one of the most catastrophically patient people I've ever encountered in a personal one. He said: the good news is he finally stopped being patient at the right moment. He said: to George and Kristine.They raised their glasses.George said: that took you fifteen years of material and produced three sentences.Daniel said: quality over quantity.They stayed until eleven. George took a car home. He texted Kristine on the way — just her name, which was their sh

Chapter 138

Then the USB and the note from the bachelorette dinner.He looked at them both. He read them carefully. He did not say anything immediately, which was how she knew he was taking it seriously rather than moving to manage it.He said: the card from the dress shop. The handwriting.She said: I don't recognise it.He said: and the woman who delivered the USB. Did Lucy get a clear look at her.She said: enough for a description. Nothing identifying.He was quiet for a moment.He said: we should give both of these to Walsh.She said: yes. And I need to watch what's on the drive.He said: Kristine—She said: I know what you're going to say. You're going to say it's designed to destabilise me and watching it does the work for whoever made it.He said: yes.She said: and that's true. But I cannot marry you with an unwatched drive in a drawer. I've learned enough about myself in the past two years to know that whatever is on it will be worse in my imagination than on the screen. I need to see i

Chapter 139

A letter from the patient to a named external party, reviewed by the clinical team, forwarded through the facility's patient advocate office to the relevant lawyer, who then contacted George and Kristine to ask whether they wished to receive it.George said no without deliberating.Kristine said: I want to read it.He looked at her.She said: I know what you think. And you might be right. But she has been in that facility for eight months. She is under psychiatric supervision and her communications are reviewed before they leave. If her clinical team cleared this letter to be forwarded, it means they believe it is not harmful. I want to know what she has to say.He was quiet for a moment.He said: I don't want to read it.She said: you don't have to. I'll read it and I'll tell you what's in it.He said: that's not—She said: George. You've been through this person's testimony, her diagnosis, her trial, her sentencing, the revelation that she was handed the drugs by Sandra Reeves. You

Chapter 140

Eighty-one people. The venue held one hundred and twenty and the room with eighty-one would feel full without feeling packed, which was what they had wanted. Mae, the events coordinator, sent a confirmation that everything was in place and attached a floor plan with the seating draft that the caterer had produced.Kristine looked at the floor plan for twenty minutes and adjusted three tables and then sent it back.George reviewed the ceremony order with the officiant on Tuesday — a friend of Daniel's who had done this several times and had a good sense of what people actually needed from the words said in those minutes as opposed to what they thought they needed.The venue was confirmed, the flowers confirmed, the band confirmed. The catering menu was locked. The photographer — James, who had been booked from the proposal that never happened — was confirmed for twelve hours starting at two in the afternoon.Everything was in place.On Thursday evening they were sitting at the kitchen

Chapter 141

It did, but not in the way she had expected. She had expected the specific elevated quality of important time — the feeling of being inside something significant, the weeks before any major event when the ordinary seems to have been slightly lifted from its usual frequency.What she got instead was the ordinary, turned up. The same days, the same rhythms, the same apartment and the same coffee and the same Max requiring his morning walk — but every small thing slightly brighter, slightly more present, slightly more felt. She would look at George making toast in the morning and feel something in her chest that was not dramatic but was very large.They snapped at each other on Tuesday.Not about anything meaningful. She had moved something of his from the kitchen counter and he had not been able to find it and had said something impatient and she had said something impatient back and they had spent twenty minutes not quite looking at each other before Max had inserted himself between th

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