All Chapters of Billionaire Contract Marriage: Her Quest : Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Sophia's POVIsabella's daughter asked on a Sunday in November.Not the porch evening. A different day. An ordinary Sunday with the particular quality of autumn Sundays in this house — the light gray and specific, the garden in its resting state, the smell of something David had been cooking since morning moving through every room.Catherine had been with us since Saturday. Isabella and James had a anniversary dinner, a overnight, the particular gift of grandparents who were present enough to make such things possible. Catherine had arrived with her overnight bag and her stuffed rabbit — Isabella's rabbit, the original one, passed forward when Catherine was two with the ceremony the occasion deserved — and had inserted herself into the house with her customary assumption of belonging.She'd spent the morning following David through the kitchen asking questions about what everything was for. She'd spent the afternoon in the garden despite the cold, conducting what appeared to be a surv

Sophia's POVMy mother read the last page first.I'd told this story many times now. In the autobiography. At the grave. On the porch in August with the family gathered and the August light doing what August light did. To Catherine in the sitting room with the rabbit and the fire.I'd told it so many times it had become the story rather than the memory. The version that had been handled enough to be smooth. The edges worn down by use.But on a Tuesday morning in December, sitting at my desk with the fourth edition of the autobiography in my hands, I turned to the last page.And I understood something I hadn't understood before.---She read the last page first because she couldn't enjoy the journey if she was anxious about the destination.I'd always interpreted this as impatience. As her particular brand of control. The same impulse that made her three things ahead in every conversation, that gave her the precise thoroughness I'd inherited and Claudia had inherited more fully.But si

Sophia's POVCatherine turned five on a Thursday in October.The same month the roses went to sleep. The same month I'd turned fifty-eight the year before and understood, sitting at the kitchen window, that this was the best version of a life I'd been capable of imagining and that the imagination had been insufficient.Catherine's fifth birthday fell in the year I understood that the imagination kept being insufficient. That every version of the life exceeded the previous estimate.This was, I'd concluded, the correct way for things to work.---Isabella brought her in the morning.James had an early meeting. Isabella had arranged the day around it with the precise efficiency she brought to logistics, which was her grandmother's thoroughness applied to the specific chaos of a five-year-old's birthday morning.Catherine arrived at the front door with her overnight bag — she'd stayed Thursday, she'd been informed, because birthdays deserved more than a single day — and her rabbit and th

Sophia's POVAlex called on a Thursday morning in March.Not the regular call. The other kind. The one that came with a particular quality of contained excitement that he'd had since childhood — the forward momentum managed carefully, the enthusiasm present but held back until he was certain the thing deserved it."Can Dad come to the site?" he said. "This week if he can. I want to show him something.""Not me?"A pause. "You too. But I want Dad specifically."I understood. There were things between David and Alex that had their own register. Their own frequency. The specific conversation of a father and son who had found each other properly in Alex's adolescence and had been building the relationship ever since with the same deliberateness Alex brought to everything he constructed."I'll tell him," I said."Thursday afternoon if possible. The light is right at four."He'd planned it around the light.Of course he had.---The site was in the northeastern part of the city.A former in

Sophia's POVNora called on a Sunday in May.Not Emma's phone. Her own. Which meant she'd made a decision about who she was calling and had chosen deliberately.I answered on the second ring."Are you free?" she said. "To talk properly. Not quickly.""I'm free.""Can I come over?"She arrived forty minutes later. Twenty-one years old, Emma's eldest, with her mother's watchfulness and Jake's warmth and something of her own that had been becoming more defined with each passing year. She was in her third year of environmental science. She'd spent last summer on a research vessel in the North Atlantic collecting ocean temperature data. She'd come back from it changed in the specific way people came back from experiences that had confirmed something they'd needed confirmed.She sat at the kitchen table.David made tea and found reasons to be elsewhere.Nora watched him go. "He always does that.""He knows when rooms need two people.""Isabella said the same thing once." She wrapped her han