All Chapters of Chasing His Divorced Wife: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

ELARA'S POVMonday arrived the way Mondays do. Without ceremony.I was at the desk by eight with coffee and the manuscript open and the revision staring back at me with the particular resistance of work that needed another hour before it would cooperate.Damien left for the office at eight-thirty. He kissed the top of my head on his way out, coat already on, and I heard the door close and the apartment shift into its daytime quiet.I worked for three hours straight.The middle chapter was opening up the way restructured things do when the restructure is right. Slowly at first, then with momentum. I cut four paragraphs I'd been attached to and felt the chapter breathe better without them. That was always the test. Whether the thing breathed.At eleven-thirty I stopped and made more coffee and stood at the kitchen window looking at the February street below.The ring caught the light from the window.I looked at it for a moment. Still adjusting to it being there. Not unpleasantly. Just

ELARA'S POVI woke up before him on Friday.First time since Seattle. I lay still for a moment registering it, the New York light coming through the curtains differently than Seattle light, sharper, more insistent, the city already fully operational at seven in the morning.I got up without waking him and went to the kitchen.The coffee machine was different from Seattle's. More complicated, the kind that required a brief orientation before it cooperated. I figured it out and stood at the window while it ran and looked at the city forty-three floors below.New York in February from this height looked like a blueprint of itself. Everything is deliberate. Nothing wasted.I'd lived here for four years before Seattle. Known these streets at ground level, in all weather, at all hours. From up here it looked like somewhere else entirely.Damien appeared at seven-forty.Hair undone, the grey shirt again, moving to the coffee with the particular efficiency of someone who needed it before full

ELARA'S POVSophie came to the apartment Saturday morning.I'd told her about the date the night before, a text sent from the restaurant while Damien was in the bathroom, because I couldn't wait and Sophie would have been upset to find out I'd known for twelve hours without telling her.Her response had been a voice memo. Forty seconds of pure Sophie, equal parts excitement and immediate logistical thinking, ending with *I'm coming over tomorrow.*She arrived at ten with pastries she'd picked up from the place on Bleecker she'd been going to since college and she hugged me before she was fully through the door.Damien appeared from the bedroom, dressed, ready to be somewhere else."I'll leave you to it," he said.Sophie pointed at him. "You don't get to disappear. I have one question."He stopped."Did you know about the Hudson Valley property before she mentioned it or did she come up with it herself."He looked at her steadily. "She came up with it herself."Sophie nodded like this

ELARA'S POVVictoria responded on Monday.A letter again. Faster than the first one. Four days from Damien's notification to the envelope appearing through James, which meant she'd written it the same day or the next.Damien brought it to the kitchen table unopened and set it between us with his coffee.He looked at it for a moment."Do you want to read it first or together," he said."Together."He opened it.One page this time. The handwriting controlled from the first line, none of the second-page shift that had appeared in the previous letter. Either she'd found steadier footing or she'd written this one faster, before feeling could complicate the syntax.He read it aloud.She congratulated us. The word formal, chosen carefully, not warm but not cold either, occupying the precise middle distance of someone attempting appropriate without knowing how to reach genuine. She wrote that she understood the wedding would be small and that she was not writing to request inclusion. She was

ELARA'S POVWe drove up Friday evening.Damien drove, which he preferred on longer stretches, and I had the window and the darkening Hudson Valley landscape and a playlist neither of us commented on but both of us listened to.Three hours from the city. The last forty minutes on roads that narrowed progressively, the kind of roads that required attention and rewarded it with views that appeared suddenly between trees and then were gone.Ruth had left the key under a stone by the front door and a note on the kitchen table. The handwriting loose and warm, nothing like Victoria's. She'd stocked the fridge with basics and left instructions for the woodstove and told us to walk the orchard in the morning before the mist burned off.We read the note together standing in the kitchen.The stone house was exactly as I remembered it. Low ceilings, thick walls, the particular warmth of a place that had been heating itself from the inside for two hundred years. It smelled like woodsmoke and old t