บททั้งหมดของ The Replacement Wife : บทที่ 81 - บทที่ 90

CHAPTER 81: NAMESWe wait until the next appointment to find out.At twenty-two weeks, the sonographer confirms what the twenty-week scan couldn't quite show clearly. Both boys. She says it matter-of-factly, as though this is ordinary information, which for her it is. For Dominic it apparently is also, because his expression doesn't change. He nods, the single nod of a man absorbing a fact.For me it takes a moment longer.Not because I had a preference I genuinely didn't. Just because boys means something specific has been confirmed and the two shapes on the screen are now slightly more real than they were thirty seconds ago. I look at the screen and I think: two boys. And then I think about Helena, who is now six months old and has very decided opinions about her environment and the objects in it, and I think: she is going to absolutely dominate them both.We go home and we begin the problem of names.This turns out to be harder than I expected. Which is saying s

CHAPTER 83: FELICITY TESTIFIESThe federal building is on the lower west side, a grey granite block that has the particular architecture of government seriousness, heavy, deliberate, built to communicate that the things that happen inside it are not casual.Felicity's lawyer meets us in the lobby at eight-thirty. He is the kind of lawyer who wears the same kind of suit every day and communicates primarily through understatement, which I have come to trust as a professional style. He goes over the process with Felicity one more time, which is the third time she has heard it but which she listens to fully, the way you listen to safety instructions on an aeroplane when you already know what they say but it helps to hear them anyway.I am twenty-three weeks pregnant and wearing the only coat that still closes properly. I am here because Felicity asked me to come on day one. She didn't explain why, and I didn't ask, because the reasons don't need to be articulated when someone

CHAPTER 85: ELEANOR'S DEPARTUREThe email from Eleanor's solicitor arrives on a Thursday morning.It is a form notification the kind that legal offices send automatically when address records are updated. The subject line says: Change of Address Notification E. Hartley. The body is three sentences: a reference number, the note that correspondence should now be directed to a London address, and a standard confidentiality footer. The London address is in Kensington, which is the kind of address Eleanor would choose. It has always been important to Eleanor that things look a specific way.I read it twice. I closed the email.I sit at the kitchen table for a moment and I try to feel the thing I expect to feel, which is something. A weight lifting, maybe. Or its opposite: the complicated grief of something finally resolving that you always wanted to resolve differently. I have known people who cried when their difficult parents left. I have known people who felt nothing and then fe

CHAPTER 87: THIRD TRIMESTERAt thirty-two weeks I am running out of body.This is not a complaint. It is a physical fact that I am tracking with the same attention I track everything. The twins are approximately four pounds each, which collectively is eight pounds of person being carried by a body that was designed for one person at a time and is currently managing this through a combination of physiological adaptation and what I can only describe as structural protest.My lower back has opinions. My ribs have been redistributed to make room for people who did not ask permission. My lung capacity is approximately seventy percent of what it was in January, which I notice most when I climb the stairs and have to pause at the top in a way I never did before, and which Helena finds interesting to watch from the landing.I work from home on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday I go to the office, which is twenty-three minutes from the house in the car and whi

CHAPTER 89: GRACE'S FIRST BIRTHDAYHelena Grace Laurent is one year old today.The party is small by design. This was my call and Dominic agreed without argument, which is how I knew he agreed. The guest list is the people who have been in this house in the past year: Sebastian, Felicity, James, Victor. Mrs. Chen, who is more family than guest and therefore doesn't count in either direction. Helena herself, who is the reason for all of it and who has no understanding of birthdays yet but a very developed understanding of rooms full of people and food.Mrs. Chen made the cake. She started it yesterday afternoon and I have been banned from the kitchen since four PM today, which she enforced by simply standing in the kitchen doorway until I went away. The cake has been revealed to be lemon, which Mrs. Chen decided was appropriate for October and appropriate for Helena specifically, which I take as a compliment on Helena's general disposition.It is a Saturday. The sitting room an