All Chapters of Everything Except You: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

She looked at him. At the pain in it. At the exhaustion. She was so tired. She was so tired of his pain landing on her like it was hers to absorb. Of converting it into composure and walking back into that building the next morning and doing it again. Of being the place his grief came to live. She thought about Faiyaz on a terrace in Santa Barbara. Warm. Present. Not asking her to justify her own existence. Something shifted in her. “Yes,” she said. His face changed immediately. Something moved through it — fast, ugly, the expression of a man who had asked a question half hoping for the wrong answer and got it anyway. “I chose him,” she said. Her voice vibrating at the edges. “Because he does not question my love. He does not question my dignity. He does not make me prove who I am every day. He trusts me. He does not drag my pain into a room full of strangers and call it strategy.” She looked at him. At the bloodshot edges of his eyes. At two and a half years of his

Thousands of miles away, in Switzerland, another man had no idea his own war was about to change.Past ten on a Wednesday, Adam came out of the last call and found her still at her desk, laptop open, courier bag already by the door.“Go home,” he said.“In a minute.” She didn’t look up. “The Berne response needs to go out tonight, or you’ll think about it all night.”He stopped.“How do you know that?”She looked up then.“Because every time something actually worries you, you stop reading and start staring.”A small shrug.“You looked at that file three times today.”She went back to the screen.“Ten more minutes.”…Outside her building, she turned to him.“I made meatloaf this morning.”She hesitated just enough to make him look at her.“There’s too much.”Silence.“Would you like some?”He looked at her.She didn’t smile.Didn’t soften the invitation.She simply waited.“Yes,” he said.…The apartment was warm. She moved through the kitchen with the unconscious familiarity of some

The house was dark when he got in, save for the small lamp Miriam always left burning in the nursery hallway, the one Liyana had once declared "the good kind of dark" because it let her see the door without letting the monsters see her. He stood in her doorway for a long moment before he went in. She was asleep on her side, Bun Bun crushed under one arm, the blanket kicked half off the way it always was by midnight regardless of how carefully anyone tucked it. He crossed the room without turning on the light. He knew this floor without looking at it — which boards to avoid, which step by the bed creaked. He sat on the edge of the mattress. Didn't wake her. Didn't need to. He just needed, for a moment, to be somewhere his hands remembered how to be gentle. He straightened the blanket. Smoothed one wild curl back from her face. She stirred, murmured something with no shape to it, and settled again, one small fist finding the front of his shirt out of habit even in sleep. *I thi

The call came through at eleven forty-three. Not from Switzerland directly. Michael flagged it first, a name that had turned up in three separate searches Raiyan had run over the past week. Sophia Roseann Reyes. EU climate infrastructure. Norway base of operations. Government adjacent. Extremely low media profile. The same name from Geneva. Raiyan was between the Singapore debrief and the Frankfurt budget review. He had four minutes. He called Michael. “The profile,” he said. “Where are we.” “Clean on the surface.” A pause, the kind Michael used when he was about to say something that would land hard. “But we found something, sir. Sophia Roseann Reyes and Sophia Al Fayez are the same person. Omar Al Fayez’s first wife. She disappeared from public record about eighteen years ago. Reappeared under the Reyes name, her maiden name, running environmental enterprises across Switzerland and Norway. Very deliberate invisibility. Someone helped her disappear.” Raiyan said nothing

"Because I'm not looking for anything back." He said it simply, like it wasn't a confession at all, though it was. "I never have been." She didn't have anything to say to that. "I've loved you since, I don't know, Zoya," he said. "You probably don't even remember the day. You fell off the wall behind the villa and split your knee open and refused to cry in front of anyone, and I sat with you for two hours until you finally let me walk you inside." A small, tired smile. "I didn't know what it was yet. I just knew I wasn't going anywhere." She sat back down on the edge of the bed, slower this time. "I watched you marry someone else," he said. "I stood in that room, saw you choose him, and told myself it was fine, because you were happy, and that was supposed to be enough." His jaw tightened. "It wasn't enough. It's never been enough. But I never once said that to you, because you didn't need it, and I wasn't going to make my love into your problem." "Faiyaz—" Zoya looked away. "I'm