Lahat ng Kabanata ng Pregnant and Rejected, Now She’s Back!: Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

Brynn pov I tried not to be bothered but in the end I called him about it. Not the kiss itself, though that was there too in the background, doing what it had been doing since Thursday which was refusing to behave like something I could file away cleanly. I thought about the thing I had almost not thought about at all, which was Cassia. I had spent three years being the woman in a marriage that Darius had never fully been in, the woman on the wrong side of his attention, the woman who was there and overlooked and present and invisible. I had not pushed Solene off any cliff, but I understood what it was to be the person being displaced, to occupy a position that someone else was already occupying in the mind of the man whose household you shared. I was not going to be the person doing that to someone else. It was not complicated. It was actually one of the clearest things I could see in the whole unclear situation, and when I called Darius I said it plainly, without softening it.

Brynn povI stared at the name for a long moment.I answered because I wanted to know what angle was coming. That was the honest reason. There was a version of not answering that felt like protection and a version that felt like avoidance and I had committed to telling the difference between those two things, and not answering Cassia felt like avoidance, the kind that left you wondering what she said to the air when you weren't there to hear it."Brynn," she said. Warm. Pleasant. Almost easy.Which meant she was at her most dangerous.I had seen Cassia in many registers across the months of this. I had seen her cold and I had seen her calculating and I had seen the brittle place underneath both of those that showed itself when she felt her position slipping. The pleasant register was the one she used when she had decided something, when she had assessed the situation and found an approach she was confident in, and she used it the way a person used a good coat, to look composed while t

Darius pov. She said she wanted my opinion on something important but we both know that was just an excuse to come to my place. We were in the kitchen. She had been helping Jake with a school project earlier in the evening, something about ecosystems again, and the remnants of it were still on the table, a few photographs and a glue stick and the particular debris of a child's creative process. She had been clearing it while I made tea that neither of us had asked for but both of us accepted when it appeared, and at some point the clearing had finished and the tea was on the counter and we were still in the kitchen. She was leaning against the counter across from me. She had taken her shoes off at some point in the evening, which she did when she was comfortable, and her hair was slightly less composed than it was when she arrived, the way it went after a few hours and two children and someone else's school project. She looked the way she looked when she was not performing anything.

Brynn pov Two or three evenings a week, sometimes at his place after I’d dropped the twins at the hotel with Seth, sometimes at mine during the rare nights they stayed with my parents. Sometimes I stayed until morning, slipping out before dawn to make it back in time for the twins’ breakfast routine. Sometimes I left immediately after, unable to risk the intimacy of sleeping beside him, of waking up tangled together in ways that felt too close to what we’d had before. It was supposed to be casual, just physical release and nothing more, a way to scratch an itch that had been building since that almost-kiss in his bedroom. No emotions, no complications, no risk of mistaking sex for something it wasn’t. That was the rule I’d set for myself, the boundary that was supposed to keep me safe. But I was aware, sitting in my office on a Thursday afternoon while trying to focus on budget projections, that I’d stopped counting how many times I’d revised those rules. Stopped tracking the w

Brynn’s POV I called him on a Tuesday afternoon from my car, sitting in the production lot after a meeting that had left me rattled and frustrated in ways that had nothing to do with actual business problems and everything to do with creative egos. Not about business schedules or pickup arrangements or the children any of the hundred legitimate reasons I might need to contact my ex-husband turned occasional hookup. I just pulled out my phone and dialed his number without thinking about it, my thumb moving automatically to his contact, some reflex bypassing all my careful reasoning about boundaries and appropriate contact levels. “Brynn,” he answered on the second ring, his voice carrying that slight edge of concern it always had when I called unexpectedly during work hours. “Everything okay with Jake and Julie?” “They’re fine,” I said, still staring at the steering wheel where my keys dangled from the ignition. “This isn’t about them.” A pause, brief but noticeable enough that I