All Chapters of After the Divorce, My Ex Husband Came Crawling Back: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

ARIANAHe doesn't tell me it'll be fine, and he doesn't offer empty reassurance dressed up as comfort. He just pulls me into him, one hand at the back of my head, and the other holds firmly yet gently against his chest."You have to keep living," he says quietly, against my hair. "No matter what. You don't get to disappear just because he might be gone for a while. Think of him as okay, wherever he is. And when the time is right, he'll come back."I don't know why those words settle me the way they do. Maybe because they don't promise anything false. Maybe because he isn't trying to fix what can't be fixed, he's just standing here, letting me fall apart without flinching from it.I'd been cautious around Mason once, for reasons I couldn't fully name even to myself. I can't remember exactly when that caution started fading. Maybe it was the phone calls, the tea, or the way he never pushed, and never once made me feel managed. The way he always seemed to appear exactly when something i

MASON"It's about me," she says finally. "Someone's testing whether I can be moved. Whether the mess brings me to my knees the way it did Whitman.""That's what it looks like.""And if I pass," she says slowly, "what happens then?"I hold her gaze and let the silence answer for me, because that's a question I already know the answer to, and it isn't one I'm ready to give her yet. Before it can stretch long enough for her to push harder, I change what I'm offering her instead. 'I don't have that answer for you. But I have something better, a way forward.'"She sets the folder down fully now, giving me her whole attention. "I'm listening.""You don't fix something like this in one move." I lean forward slightly, elbows on the counter. "If you cut every compromised contract at once, whoever's behind this knows within a day that you found them, and they scatter, rebuild somewhere you can't see. You lose the thread completely.""So what, we do nothing?" Her eyes searching my face for an

MAXWELLHer voice is low, controlled in the specific way that means she's furious. "After I agreed to your overnights without a fight, Max? After everything?""I'm filing because I'm concerned.""Don't." She steps closer, close enough that I can see exactly how angry she is. "Don't do that. This isn't about the twins' safety, and we both know it.""You don't know what kind of man you've brought into your children's lives."That stops her, just for a second, a flicker of something crossing her face before the anger closes back over it. "You don't know anything about Mason."“I know enough.” She laughs, a small one. "All of a sudden you are saying you know my friends more than I do? Well, you know nothing." She's shaking her head now. "This is about you not being able to stand that I've moved on.""Maybe." I let that land, because there's no point denying it entirely, not to her. "But you know what I want, Ariana. You've always known. Give me that, and I'll let this go. The overnights

VICTORAlmost two weeks after Niveria, we finally land back in Lakebridge.I still feel it in my chest sometimes, a tightness that isn't quite pain anymore, just the memory of pain, lingering the way a bruise lingers after the color's already faded. The doctors say I'm cleared to travel, cleared to work in moderation, cleared to resume something close to a normal life. They don't know what normal looks like for a man who's just watched a death sentence he thought he understood reach thirty thousand feet to try to kill him.I know something now that I didn't know two weeks ago. Durrell isn't coming home soon. Maybe not for a long while yet, and I don't know how to tell Ariana that.I've rehearsed it on the flight, different versions, softer ones, harder ones, none of them land anywhere close to true without also landing somewhere close to unbearable. There's no way to tell a woman raising two toddlers alone that the man she loves is alive, as far as I know, but bound to a year he ca

ARIANAVictor is standing near the windows when I arrive, and he looks thinner than the man who left Lakebridge two weeks ago. His sharper edges have softened into something tired, something that hasn't slept properly in longer than a night. Selene sits on the couch nearby, watching him the way you'd watch someone recovering from surgery, careful, and alert, like she's tracking every breath he takes. I file the strangeness of that away for later. Right now there's only room in me for Durrell."Sit," Victor says.I don't. "What happened?"He tells me, eventually, in pieces I have to physically brace myself to hear. Durrell is alive. Durrell was taken. A family called Kraven, a blood I've never heard spoken of, holding him in a city across an ocean because of a mother he spent his whole life grieving without answers.“Thank God.” I sigh with relief.The relief I feel is sharp and overwhelming, my whole body sagging with it before the rest of the sentence catches up and steals it bac