Lahat ng Kabanata ng Chasing His Divorced Wife: Kabanata 121 - Kabanata 130

DAMIEN'S POVFriday morning I woke up thinking about the letter, not the unsent ones. A different letter. One I hadn't written yet.I lay in the dark for a while with Elara asleep beside me and thought about what I wanted to say and to whom and whether saying it served anything beyond my own need to say it.I decided it did.After coffee I went to the office and opened a document and started writing.It was to my mother.Not the version I'd have written a year ago, cold and legal, boundaries established through distance. Something different. Something that required more precision because it was asking her to understand rather than simply comply.I wrote for an hour.When I finished I read it twice, changed three sentences, and then saved it without sending it.Not yet. But soon.Elara appeared at eight-thirty with her hair still loose and sat across from me at the kitchen table with her coffee and her phone, reading something that required her full attention.I closed the laptop."The

DAMIEN'S POVSaturday we found the chairs,not at the first place or the second. The third shop, a small furniture store on Clement that Elara had read about but never visited, run by a man in his sixties who made pieces to order and kept a small selection of finished work on the floor.The chairs were near the back.Two of them, slightly different from each other in the way handmade things were, the same design executed twice with natural variation. Deep seats, wide arms, fabric the color of dark moss that looked like it had already been lived in.Elara sat in the left one without asking permission.She settled into it, tested the depth, looked at the arm width."Sit in the other one," she said.I sat.The chair was exactly what she'd described. Deep enough to actually disappear into. The kind of furniture that made no effort to impress you and was better for it.We looked at each other from the chairs."Yes," she said."Yes," I said.The owner, whose name was Gerald, told us the chai

DAMIEN'S POVVictoria's letter arrived Tuesday, not email. An actual letter, handwritten, delivered through James because she didn't have Elara's Seattle address and I hadn't given her mine.I found it on the kitchen table when I came back from a morning run. James had messaged ahead: *Something arrived for you from New York. Scanned and sent. Check your email.*I made coffee first.Then I sat at the table and opened it.Her handwriting was the same as always. Precise, controlled, each letter formed with the deliberateness of someone who'd been taught penmanship as a form of character.I read it slowly.She'd written four pages.The first page was what I'd expected, careful language, acknowledgment shaped to minimize rather than illuminate, the syntax of someone admitting to a version of events that protected her own narrative. She was sorry if certain actions had caused distress. She had believed she was protecting the family's interests.I read it twice and set it down.The second p

DAMIEN'S POVI bought the ring on Friday, not impulsively. I'd known what I wanted for two weeks and spent those two weeks confirming it with the particular patience I applied to decisions that couldn't be undone. A jeweler on Fifth I'd used once before for a watch. Private. No walk-ins.I didn't tell anyone.Not James. Not Marcus. No one.It felt like something that belonged only to the space between Elara and me until it didn't anymore.She had a call that morning with her editor. Something about the manuscript timeline shifting, a deadline moved forward, the particular stress she carried quietly in her shoulders when work pressed against her in ways she didn't want to burden me with.I watched her take the call from the hallway without her knowing.She was at the desk by the window, legs folded under her, notebook open beside the laptop, pen in her hand even though she wasn't writing. She did that when she was thinking. Held the pen like a placeholder for thoughts she hadn't formed

DAMIEN'S POVWe told Sophie on Sunday.Elara called her after breakfast, put it on speaker without announcing why, and let the conversation find its way there naturally. Sophie was mid-sentence about something else entirely when Elara said it."We're engaged."Two seconds of silence.Then Sophie made a sound that wasn't quite a word and Elara held the phone away from her ear and I watched from across the table trying not to smile.It took four minutes for Sophie to calm down enough to ask coherent questions. She asked six of them in rapid succession without waiting for answers to the first three. Where was the ring, had she seen it yet, when did it happen, was it beautiful, did she cry, when were they coming back to New York."I didn't cry," Elara said."That's so you," Sophie said. "Send me a picture of the ring.""Later.""Now."Elara looked at me. I lifted my hands in a gesture that offered no help whatsoever.She took the picture and sent it while still on the call and Sophie's re