Lahat ng Kabanata ng Pregnant and Rejected, Now She’s Back!: Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

Brynn POVHe found me in the car park after the school event, which was not planned, or if it was planned he had chosen to make it look like coincidence and I was too tired from three hours of children's performances to assess which.The event had been Julie's first school showcase, a 40 programme of songs and a short play in which Julie had played a tree with the committed intensity of someone who believed trees deserved proper representation, and Jake had sat beside me in the audience and whispered commentary throughout at a volume that the parents around us found either charming or irritating depending on their disposition. It had been a good evening. The ordinary good kind, the kind I had spent five years building and protecting, and I had been carrying the warmth of it as I walked to the car.Then he said my name and I turned and he was there."Thank you for letting me come," he said. Measured. Professional. The opening of a conversation he had clearly prepared."Of course," I sa

The drawer stuck, which it had always done, and when he forced it the envelopes slid forward and stopped against the lip of the desk.He looked at them.He had put them there the night before the surgery with the intention of never needing to open them, which had been the entire point of the exercise, the preparation that was designed to be unnecessary, the accounting made in advance of an event that did not occur. The surgery had been clean. Jake had recovered. The envelopes had been sitting in the drawer for weeks, sealed and undisturbed, waiting for him to deal with them or not deal with them or simply go on leaving them there the way he left things he was not yet ready to address.He sat down slowly.He opened Jake's first.He read it through once quickly, the way he read things when he was not sure he wanted to read them but had committed to doing it, and then he sat with it and read it again more slowly, the way he read things that required his full attention.The words were his

Seth showed up at my hotel room the evening after Darius's office visit, takeout in hand and a determined expression on his face."We need to talk," he announced, settling onto the couch without waiting for an invitation."Hello to you too," I replied, but I took the container he offered me anyway because arguing with Seth when he was in this mood was pointless."Darius came to your office yesterday," Seth said without preamble.I paused with my chopsticks halfway to my mouth. "How do you know that?""Lena told me," he admitted, referencing my assistant who'd apparently decided my personal life was fair game for gossip with my best friend. "She said he looked devastated when he left.""Good," I said, trying to mean it."Brynn," Seth sighed, setting down his food. "I think you should hear him out."I stared at him. "That's easy for you to say. You're not the one who spent three years being destroyed by him.""You're right," Seth agreed. "It is easy for me to say because I'm not emotion

Brynn PovI had not put him on the guest list.I want to be clear about that. The event was mine, I had curated every name on that list with the focused attention I brought to things that mattered professionally, and his name was not on it, and I had felt the particular satisfaction of a woman who had successfully managed her environment when I signed off on the final version three days ago.He arrived through a partner company's invitation, which was legitimate, which I could not challenge without a conversation I did not want to have in front of two hundred industry professionals, and so I saw him come through the door at eight-fifteen and I noted his presence and I returned to the conversation I was having about distribution rights in the Nordic market and I was completely fine about it.I monitored his position in the room for the next forty minutes.This was not something I did intentionally. It was more that I became aware, periodically and against my will, of where he was and w

Brynn povIt was a Thursday, which seemed to be the day things happened between us that I had not planned for.I had dropped the children off and stayed longer than I intended to, which had also not been planned, though I had been telling myself for the better part of an hour that I was staying because Julie had wanted to show me the drawing she was working on at his kitchen table and it would have been abrupt to leave mid-drawing. This was true. It was also the kind of truth I had been using a lot lately to explain decisions that had a different reason underneath them that I was not quite ready to look at directly.Julie's drawing was finished. Jake had gone upstairs to read. The kitchen had the particular quiet it always had at this hour, the tail end of an evening, the children moving toward sleep, the house settling into itself. I had picked up my bag and come into the hallway to say goodbye and I had turned to say something, some logistical thing about the weekend schedule, and h