All Chapters of The Day I Stopped Loving Him: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Maya's POV I nearly dropped the teapot when Elena said it. Not because it shocked me exactly. Because of how flat she said it, no windup, no clearing her throat first, just the words landing on the table between us like something she'd carried so long it had gone smooth in her hands from all the handling. "I need to tell you something." I set the pot down carefully instead of fast, the way my body actually wanted to move, pulse already climbing for reasons I couldn't fully name. She'd come in from work like she did most afternoons now, the smell of machine oil and old fabric still clinging to her coat, and we'd settled into the usual rhythm, tea, small talk, the particular ease that had built itself slowly between us without either of us ever officially deciding to trust it out loud. This wasn't that rhythm. I sat down across from her and made myself stay quiet, hands wrapped around my own mug, because I'd learned, from Léo and from years of being on the receiving end of people ru

Maya's POV I stared at the silk for a long time before I let myself touch it, the way you'd look at something you weren't sure you had permission to want yet. Not white. Not quite ivory either. Something in between that had warmth to it without tipping into cream, a color I'd hunted for at three different suppliers before finding it folded on a back shelf, half-hidden behind bolts of navy nobody was buying. I draped it over the dress form and stepped back, arms crossed, studying the way it fell. "Is that the dress?" Chloe had appeared in the doorway without my hearing her, sock feet silent on the wood floor, a crayon clutched in her fist and a smear of red already on her cheek from scratching an itch without thinking about it first. "It's thinking about being the dress, baby." "Fabric can't think." "Well." I reached out and adjusted the drape at the shoulder. "It's my way of saying I haven't decided everything about it yet." She wasn't listening anymore. She'd already lost int

Maya's POV Chloe asked about her father over toast, no windup, no sense that the question carried any particular weight beyond wanting to know, the crumbs already scattering across the table in the small chaos she left behind everything she touched. Not Daniel. She had Daniel figured out already, a slow, cautious thing between them that surprised both of them in equal measure some mornings, some evenings, still finding its shape. This was the other one. Her biological father, the man who existed only as an absence she'd apparently decided needed explaining, sitting somewhere in the back of her mind gathering questions the way she gathered everything else, quietly, until she was ready to hand them over all at once. "Why doesn't my father live with us?" I turned from the counter, coffee halfway to my mouth, and set it down without drinking it. She was looking at me with the clear, serious attention she brought to things that actually mattered to her, not upset, just curious, and curi

Elena's POV I caught myself smiling at nothing on the walk to the market, some stranger's dog straining at its lead toward a puddle, and realized the smile had been there a while before I noticed it. Spring hadn't announced itself all at once. It had crept in sideways, a warmer edge to the afternoons, a tree outside my window gone from bare to something faintly green almost without my catching the shift happen. I stopped in front of it that morning, a bag of vegetables already heavy in one hand, and actually looked, the way I still had to remind myself to do sometimes. At the market, I didn't scan the crowd first the way I used to. I only noticed that afterward, standing at a stall picking through peppers, realizing I'd gone a full five minutes without once checking who stood behind me. Small thing. I filed it away anyway. Gerasim had the shop half open by the time I got there, sleeves rolled, and he didn't look up when I came in, just nodded toward the workbench where something s

Léo's POV Slow mornings at the loft had become something I built my week around without ever deciding to, the kind of habit that sneaks up on you until you notice you've been planning around it for months. Maya didn't cook on these mornings. She moved through the kitchen with the particular absent efficiency of someone whose mind was somewhere else entirely, and whatever ended up on the table was less a meal than an accumulation, bread, eggs, whatever fruit had survived the week without getting eaten. I'd started bringing pastries a while back, from the bakery a few streets over, and Chloe had declared it an excellent development the first time, and Maya hadn't said anything about it except to eat two of them without comment, which I'd learned to read as agreement. Chloe was at Daniel's for the morning. The loft had that particular quiet it got when it was only the two of us, different from the working hours, different from the hours with Chloe underfoot. More spacious somehow, like