All Chapters of Bound By A Borrowed Heart: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

GIANNAI don't sleep, I can’t, so instead I pace around the house. The townhouse is small enough that pacing covers the same ground over and over. From kitchen to living room, living room to hallway, hallway to kitchen. Twelve or more steps each way. I count and lose count because counting or pretending to count keeps the panic at a distance, keeps the walls from closing in the way they used to close in during the bad months with Ryan, when the apartment felt smaller every time he raised his voice. The heart counts with me, each beat landing on a step like a metronome set to a rhythm I didn't choose. The contract still sits on the kitchen table where the lawyers left it staring at me. Forty-seven pages or legal stuff, all for a heart. The kitchen still smells like stale toast and the lavender I brought home from the hospital. I couldn't leave it behind, I couldn't explain why I just shoved the last bouquet into my bag like a woman stealing flowers from her own funeral. I've read t

GIANNAThe SUV is nicer than any car I've ever rode in. The driver, Carlos, opens my door at exactly 7 AM, and introduces himself with a handshake and a nod, then steps aside so the woman behind him can do the same. Very cordial and coordinated. NiceHer name is Priya Sharma. She's tall, built like someone who runs and fights and doesn't do either one for fun, and when she shakes my hand her grip tells me everything her job title doesn't."Personal security," she says. "I go where you go.""Like a bodyguard?""Exactly like a bodyguard."“Okay. Let’s do this then.” I respond, lifting the only suitcase I packed. It's embarrassing how little is in it. A few change of clothes, a toothbrush, my mother's prayer shawl that still smells like her perfume if I press my face into the fabric hard enough, and every art supply I could salvage.Six tubes of paint, three brushes, a palette knife, and a can of turpentine. My whole life fits in a carry-on. It’s not entirely horrible for a fresh start.

SEAN The flatline wakes me as It always does, it’s ot a real flatline, it’s just the sound of it that lives in my head now, a frequency only I can hear, the single sustained tone that replaced my mother's heartbeat two weeks ago. It activates the moment I close my eyes and let the dark in. So I don't let the dark in. I get up, I walk, I check the locks that are already locked and the cameras that show nothing but empty rooms and moonlit corridors. I patrol every space I can lay my eyes on. That's the honest word for it. Every night I wander the same route in the same silence. I move past the library where the books she'll never finish sit on shelves she organized herself, past the dining hall where she hosted Thanksgiving dinners that lasted until midnight because she refused to let anyone leave without dessert. I wander past the kitchen where Elena leaves a covered plate I never touch. Elena has been leaving those plates for two weeks now, and every morning she finds them untou

GIANNAThe baby wakes me at around 4:45 AM with a wave of nausea that almost sends me over the side of the bed. I press my hand to my mouth and breathe through it. In, out, in, out. The pregnancy books say the morning sickness should ease by the second trimester. The books clearly haven't met this baby.When the nausea drops from emergency to manageable, I need ginger tea. I remember Elena keeps a tin in the kitchen. A whole container of fresh ginger, sliced and dried. My mouth already waters thinking about it. I pull on my sleep shirt, the oversized one that hangs up mid-thigh, and pad barefoot into the hallway.The mansion is different at the early hours of the day. It’s grey half-dark, and marble is cold under my feet, the air thick with the silence of a house that feels like it’s holding its breath. This is Sean's hour, the one he uses to disappear before I surface, before anyone is awake. I've never been up this early and I know I'm not supposed to be here.I pass through the

GIANNAI open the letter on a Tuesday because I run out of reasons not to. My eagerness finally got the best of me. It’s been three weeks already. Three weeks of sitting in the bedside drawer, face-down, with the lavender wax seal unbroken. Every night my fingers brush the edge when I reach for water and every night I pull back. Not because I don't want to read it, but because words from the dead carry a weight the living can't match, and I'm already carrying enough.But the studio is warm this morning. The light is pouring through the windows, the garden is bright outside, and the portrait of Peculiar is watching me from above the easel with eyes that seem to say, "Oh for God's sake, just read it."So I sit on the couch, break the seal, and unfold the letter. It’s lavender stationery. Of course. The scent rises from the paper like breath. Not perfume though, the real thing, pressed into the fibers.Her handwriting is beautiful, looping and confident, and every letter is shaped with