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Home / Romance / Unbeknownst / Chapter 11 - Chapter 17

All Chapters of Unbeknownst: Chapter 11 - Chapter 17

17 Chapters

News

Julien came back downstairs holding a single slipper like it was evidence in a trial."Found it," he said. "Under the radiator. I have decided not to ask how it got there.""Wise.""He is already asleep again. He fell asleep mid-complaint. I do not think he even noticed I solved the case.""Tragic," I said. "All that detective work for nothing."He set the slipper on the side table, which struck me as an odd place for it, and did not immediately sit back down. He stood near the sofa instead, one hand resting on the back of it, looking at me with an expression that hadn't fully recovered from the one he'd left the room with. I was still under the blanket. The lamp was still off. The only light in the room came from the hallway, low and gold, and from the pale reflected glow of the snow outside the window."You're staring," I said."I am aware.""Is there a reason?""I am trying to decide something.""That sounds ominous.""It is not ominous." He came around the sofa and sat down, close

One More Day

The plows came through the street at first light, and I woke to the sound of them, a low mechanical growl scraping its way up the road, and lay there for a moment feeling something in my chest sink before I'd even worked out why.I worked it out quickly enough.Downstairs, Julien was at the window with his coffee, watching the same plow make its slow pass along the far curb."They'll have the main roads clear by this afternoon," he said, without turning around. "The airport should be runni

The Distance

England was exactly where I'd left it, which was somehow the most disorienting part.The same grey light, thin and reluctant, arriving late and leaving early. The same kettle that took four minutes longer than it should. The same commute, the same desk, the same email signature I'd typed so many times my fingers no longer needed my attention to do it. I kept waiting for some visible sign that I'd changed, a different colour to the light, a different weight to my own footsteps, and found instead that the world simply resumed around me, indifferent to the fact that I had spent five days becoming someone slightly different in a country I'd only meant to visit.My aunt found the sign anyway, three days after I landed, cornering me at a family lunch with the particular gleam of a woman who has heard a rumour and intends to have it confirmed."You went to France," she said, setting down her fork with the deliberate care of someone opening negotiations, "and came back

The Distance

England was exactly where I'd left it, which was somehow the most disorienting part.The same grey light, thin and reluctant, arriving late and leaving early. The same kettle that took four minutes longer than it should. The same commute, the same desk, the same email signature I'd typed so many times my fingers no longer needed my attention to do it. I kept waiting for some visible sign that I'd changed, a different colour to the light, a different weight to my own footsteps, and found instead that the world simply resumed around me, indifferent to the fact that I had spent five days becoming someone slightly different in a country I'd only meant to visit.My aunt found the sign anyway, three days after I landed, cornering me at a family lunch with the particular gleam of a woman who has heard a rumour and intends to have it confirmed."You went to France," she said, setting down her fork with the deliberat

Distance

England was exactly where I'd left it, which was somehow the most disorienting part.The same grey light, thin and reluctant, arriving late and leaving early. The same kettle that took four minutes longer than it should. The same commute, the same desk, the same email signature I'd typed so many times my fingers no longer needed my attention to do it. I kept waiting for some visible sign that I'd changed, a different colour to the light, a different weight to my own footsteps, and found instead that the world simply resumed around me, indifferent to the fact that I had spent five days becoming someone slightly different in a country I'd only meant to visit.My aunt found the sign anyway, three days after I landed, cornering me at a family lunch with the particular gleam of a woman who has heard a rumour and intends to have it confirmed."You went to France," she said, setting down her fork with the deliberat

The Parts I Kept

The recruiter emailed again in March, politer than before but with a deadline attached this time, a real one, the kind with a date on it rather than a vague suggestion of urgency.We understand these decisions take time, it said, but we do need to move forward by the end of the month.I read it standing at my kitchen counter with a cup of tea going cold beside me, and felt the particular vertigo of a decision that had quietly stopped being hypothetical. A month. I had a month to be the version of myself who took the job, or the version who didn't, and I still hadn't worked out how to be either one without feeling like I was betraying the other.I didn't answer it that day. I put the kettle back on instead, made a fresh cup, and carried it to the sofa, where I sat for a long time doing absolutely nothing productive at all.***Julien called that evening, as he did most evenings, and I answered with what I hoped passed for my ordinary voice."You sound tired," he said, within the first

Signed

A year, it turns out, is not as long as it sounds when you're the one inside it.I flew back to France for the holidays again, almost exactly a year after the storm that had first stranded me there, and this time there was no cancelled hotel waiting to surprise me, no suitcase with a squealing wheel, no stranger's spare room I had to be talked into accepting. There was a key, cut for me that spring, sitting heavy and ordinary in my coat pocket, and a boy at the door who had grown a full inch and lost the last of his baby teeth and who still, gratifyingly, threw himself at me the moment I stepped through it."You're taller," I told him."You're the same," he informed me, with the air of a scientist confirming a hypothesis, and dragged me inside by the hand before I'd even set my bag down.

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