All Chapters of The wife I forgot to love: Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

Marcus was waiting outside the room. She had not seen him when she went in. He must have come up from somewhere. He was standing with his back against the wall and his arms crossed and his eyes on the door and when it opened and she stepped into the corridor he pushed off the wall and came to her. He did not ask how it went. He looked at her face and read whatever was there and said, “Come with me.” She went with him. He took her to the end of the corridor. Away from the room. Away from the family room. A window there that looked out over the hospital car park and beyond it a street and beyond that a small park that nobody had thought to mention existed. They stood at the window. He did not make her ask. He had never been the kind of man who made people work for information they needed. “Damian and I found something,” he said. “Before the accident. We had been building it for weeks. I need you to know what it is because it is not going to stop moving just because he is in that

She slept for three hours on the chair in the family room. Not well. Not deeply. The kind of sleep that happened when a body was too tired to stay awake and too alert to fully let go. She woke at six with a crick in her neck and her coat still on, and the folder on the seat beside her exactly where she had left it. The city outside the window was beginning. That particular pale quality of very early morning when the night had not quite finished but the day had already decided to start without it. She sat up. Looked at the folder. Then she looked out the window for a long time and let the full picture sit in her mind the way you let something sit when you have all the pieces and need to see them as a whole before you move. Camila had loved Damian. Helena had never let herself think about that properly before. It had been easier to think of Camila as the woman in the photograph. The threat. The reason everything broke. The face Helena had looked at and understood something about

She had come in every day since the accident. That was the decision she had made on the night it happened. Sitting in her car outside the building with the message sent and the next step in motion and the particular weight of what now meant still in her chest. She had decided she would come in. That she would sit at the desk and do the job and not disappear because disappearing was the thing that drew attention and drawing attention was the thing she could not afford. So she came in. Every morning at seven forty-three. Coffee on his desk out of habit before she remembered he was not going to be there and then left on the desk anyway because not making it would have felt like an admission of something. The first day she had sat at her desk and listened to the floor adjust to his absence the way floors adjusted to things that changed. Quieter in certain ways. Louder in others. People moving differently. The particular texture of an office without the person it was organised aro

The lawyers were efficient. She had expected that. What she had not expected was how quickly a thing that had taken months to build could be dismantled in a room. Forty minutes. That was all it took for the lead lawyer to walk Olivia through the formal charges. Transaction by transaction. Document by document. The delegation chain. The name change. The photograph. Olivia answered four questions directly. Declined to answer two. Said nothing at all to the rest. Her face did not change. Helena sat to the side and watched in silence. That had been agreed beforehand. Her role in the room had ended when she opened the door. What came next belonged to the process. Olivia received each piece of evidence with the stillness of someone who had known this was coming and had decided before she walked in how she was going to hold it. Head up. Hands flat on the table. Eyes on whoever was speaking. She did not argue. She did not perform composure. She simply held herself the way s

Marcus drove her back to the hospital. They did not talk much. That was fine. The kind of silence that settled between two people who had just done something significant together and did not need to explain it to each other. Marcus kept both hands on the wheel. Helena looked out the window at the city going past and let her mind be where it needed to be. She had been awake for thirty-one hours. She knew that because she had been counting without meaning to, the way she counted things when she was tired enough that the mind looked for something to hold onto and counting was simple and available. Thirty-one hours since the equipment table and the missed calls and the three words from Cassidy. A lot had happened in thirty-one hours. The hospital received them the way it received everyone. Without adjustment. The lobby the same. The lift the same. Third floor corridor the same pale light and the same sounds and the same quality of a place that kept going regardless. Marcus sai