All Chapters of I WON'T MARRY A BILLIONAIRE : Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Vivienne's POVThe drive took twenty minutes.The same drive I had made my whole life. The specific route that my body knew without requiring the navigation that unfamiliar places required. Left at the corner with the pharmacy that had changed hands three times but had always been a pharmacy. Right at the junction with the post box that had been painted over but was still the same shape. The street that ran alongside the park and then the turn into the quieter road where my mother's house had been sitting for thirty years waiting for whoever needed to arrive at it.Charles drove.We did not talk much on the way.Not from tension. From the specific quality of two people who were moving toward something significant and had decided that the moving toward it was its own kind of preparation.I looked out the window.I thought about all the times I had made this drive.As a child coming home from somewhere. As a young woman arriving with things I needed to say. As a person in the middle of

Vivienne's POVShe set her mug down.Both hands flat on the table the way she placed them when she was about to say something that required her full steadiness.She looked at us.At both of us sitting across from her in this kitchen where the warning had been given and the agreement had been signed and the laugh had filled the room with something nobody expected.She began.---She started with Donald Stone.Not with the broad account. With the specific texture of what it had been like to love him at twenty four when loving him had been the most natural thing available to her and she had not yet understood what the loving was going to cost.She talked about the beginning.Before the taking. Before the slow quiet erasure of the things that had been hers. Before the specific cruelty of a man who understood that nobody would believe his wife's pain and had used that understanding deliberately.She talked about what he had been before all of that.Charming. Generous in the early way. The

Vivienne's POVI wore both of them home.Not as a decision I made consciously. As the natural result of what had happened in that kitchen. My mother had fastened the old bracelet on my left wrist. The Harlow bracelet was already on my right. I had come to my mother's house wearing one and I left wearing two and the wearing of both felt not like two separate things but like the completed form of something that had always been pointing toward this configuration.One from the beginning of everything.One from the healing of it.I looked at them in the car on the way home.Charles driving. The city outside. The specific quality of a Tuesday evening in the city when something significant had happened and the city did not know it and did not need to.I looked at both wrists.The new bracelet and the old one.The coordinates of The Harlow and the metal that had been my grandmother's and her mother's before that.Three generations of women who had loved and been hurt by love and had built thi

Vivienne's POVThe meal was extraordinary.Not in the elaborate sense. In the sense of something that was exactly right for the room it arrived in and the people sitting in it and the evening it was part of.Simple food made properly.Charles had found what was available and had worked with it the way he always worked with what was available, with the specific attention of someone who understood that the ingredients were not the point and what happened to them was.My mother had set the table while he cooked.Not ceremonially. In the practical way of someone who set tables because tables needed to be set and setting them properly was simply how you did it. The plates she used for occasions that merited the good plates. The glasses that lived in the back of the cupboard.She had not been asked to use the good plates.She had decided.---We sat down.The three of us at the kitchen table where so much had been said and decided and signed and received.Tonight none of that was the subjec

Vivienne's POVI packed a bag on the Saturday.Charles watched me pack it from the doorway of our bedroom with the expression he wore when he had already understood something before it was explained and was simply present while the explaining happened."How long," he said."A week," I said.He nodded."I will come on Sunday for dinner," he said."She will make chamomile tea," I said."I know," he said.He came in and picked up the bag from the bed and carried it to the door and that was the whole conversation.---My mother was not expecting me to stay.She had assumed I would come more frequently. Daily perhaps. The particular form of attention that a health revelation produced in adult children who loved their parents and were managing the revelation by managing their proximity to it.She had been prepared for that.I did not do that.I came on Saturday with my bag and put it in my old room and came back down to the kitchen and sat at the counter and said what do you need done today