All Chapters of Chasing His Divorced Wife: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

ELARA'S POVI woke up before him.Lay still and listened to the rain, which had continued from yesterday, lighter now, more suggestion than statement. The room was dim and warm and Damien was asleep beside me on his stomach with his arm across my waist.I didn't move for a long time.I thought about nothing in particular. Let my mind go where it went, which was nowhere urgent. The exhibition sequence we'd fixed yesterday. The Croatian ceramic on the shelf. Daniel pressed yes three times. The soup was better the second day.Everything settled overnight into one thing.I turned my head and looked at him.Asleep he looked younger. Not the CEO, not the man navigating complicated family reckonings. Just a person at rest, his face slack and unguarded, his breathing even.I'd spent three years being invisible beside this person.Now I spent Saturday mornings looking at him sleep and feeling nothing but settled.The distance between those two things was the whole story.He stirred at half pas

ELARA'S POVDecember arrived and with it the particular quality of the city preparing for winter.Seattle did Christmas without the theatrical snow of other cities, just the cold and the lights and the shortened days and the specific smell of the season that arrived in the first week of December like it had been waiting just offstage.I noticed it on a Monday morning walking to the gallery. The air different. The light different. The city doing something to itself that it only did once a year.I texted Damien from the street: *It smells like December.*He replied in four minutes: *First fire tonight.*I put my phone away and walked the rest of the way to the gallery with the uncomplicated happiness of someone whose life contained small reliable things.The first fire was a ritual we hadn't named as one. It had just happened two years running, the first genuinely cold evening of December, Damien building the fire while I made something warm in the kitchen. This year would be the third.

ELARA'S POVWednesday I left the gallery at four, not because I had to. Because I wanted to be home before he arrived and I wanted the apartment to be warm and ready in the way apartments are warm and ready when someone who lives in them has been paying attention.I stopped at the market on the way. Not the farmers market, just the grocery two blocks from home, moving through it quickly with the specific focus of someone who knew what they were making and needed only the missing pieces.Home at four-thirty.I started dinner at five, the slow version, something that would be ready when he arrived and would have been working the whole time he was in transit. I put music on low, nothing specific, whatever came, and the apartment filled with the sound and the smell of cooking and the particular quality of early December evening through the windows.I wasn't performing any of it. That was the thing I kept noticing. Three years ago I would have been performing, managing how it looked, ensur

ELARA'S POVMaya arrived at seven with a bottle of wine and a box.The box was the surprise she'd refused to describe. She set it on the kitchen counter with the satisfaction of someone who'd been thinking about this for a while."Open it," she said.I opened it.Inside, wrapped in tissue, a small framed piece. I lifted it out.A photograph. Black and white, printed on good paper. The four of us at the Vancouver gallery opening in February. Maya and James on one side, Damien and me on the other, caught mid-conversation, none of us looking at the camera.Real and unperformed in the specific way photographs were when nobody knew they were being taken."Claire sent it to me in October," Maya said. "She'd had it since the opening. I had it printed properly."I held it and looked at it.The four of us mid-laugh about something. Damien's hand on my back. James looked at Maya the way he looked at her. All of it is real."Maya," I said."Don't.""I'm not going to cry.""Good. Because I didn't

ELARA'S POVThe bowl came out of the kiln on a Tuesday three weeks before Christmas.Jun called me over when she opened it. Set it on the worktable without ceremony and stepped back.I looked at it.The shape was what I'd been working toward. Low and wide with an irregular rim that wasn't a mistake, was in fact the point, the place where the hand had been present in the making. The glaze had done something in the firing that I hadn't fully predicted, a depth in the blue-grey that shifted when the light changed.Like the Croatian ceramic. Like the painting Damien had found in the Vancouver archives.The right blue.Jun said nothing.I looked at her."Yes," she said. Just that.I brought it home wrapped in my jacket the same way I'd brought the Korčula watercolor home, the same way I'd carried things that mattered before I had the right container for them.Damien was home when I arrived.He was at the dining table with his laptop and looked up when I came in and saw immediately from the