Home / Romance / Not The Man She Wanted / Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

All Chapters of Not The Man She Wanted: Chapter 191 - Chapter 200

200 Chapters

Chapter 191: After Harry

I set out one cup on the counter, and the house felt like it had been emptied with a spoon.Spring had come to the lake, and I had not noticed. The birches had turned a pale, wet green. Geese cut the sky in loose wedges. Through the kitchen window I could see the dock, and the two boats, and the second one tied a little crooked, the way Harry always tied it. Nobody had fixed the knot. Nobody would.Three months had passed since the snow.The house was half empty now, in a way that had nothing to do with rooms. Harry's reading glasses still sat on the arm of the porch swing. His coat still hung by the door, with a receipt in the pocket and a dried leaf stuck in the collar. I did not touch it. The toaster stood on the counter, and I did not use it.Macbeth moved into the cottage in April.She and David carried boxes across the yard in the thin sun, with little Megan trotting behind with a stuffed rabbit and a baby monitor she did not understand. A new baby boy slept in David's arms, wra

Chapter 192: Jenny Writes Again

I wrote the first line on a Tuesday, and I did not use a single big word.Dear Megan, dear Henry, and anyone who comes after. This book is about your grandfather. He burned toast. I will start there.I sat in my study at the little desk by the window, with the rain tapping the glass and the lake gone silver beyond it. The wall of frames glowed softly in the lamplight. Harry's reading glasses lay beside my elbow. I had finally carried them in from the porch.I did not want to write another memoir. One was enough. I wanted something smaller. A slim thing, to be read at kitchen tables, in the lap of a child who could not yet read it alone.I wrote about the day we met. I did not dress it up. I wrote that I had been afraid and he had been kind, and that the first kindness had not been enough, and the second had not been either. I wrote that it took ten thousand small ones.I wrote about choice.You will be given a beginning, I wrote. You will not choose it. Mine was a contract signed in a

Chapter 193: Fabiola Goes Home

He bought a one way ticket, and he told me only after it was paid for.It was a gray morning in late spring. Fabiola sat at the kitchen table in his gray coat, with a bowl of Mexican oranges between us and two cups of tea going cold. He was eighty. His hands had a tremor now, a small steady shiver, like leaves in a light wind. Two years had passed since the snow. He had slept in our guest room for most of them."Jenny," he said. "I am going home."I looked up from the oranges. "You are home.""Baja."The word landed in the quiet kitchen like a dropped plate. The clock above the stove ticked. A heron stood at the end of the dock outside the window, gray and patient."For a visit," I said."For good."My chest went tight. Every ache I had kept folded away came up at once. I had already buried my mother, and a husband, and a brother's wife I had loved like a sister. I did not know how to stand in a house with one more empty chair."Why?" My voice came out sharper than I meant.He did not

Chapter 194: Fabiola's End

The call came on a bright morning, and I knew the voice before it spoke.Not Fabiola's. Rafael's. The young man from the clinic. He was not young anymore, but I always saw him as the boy who once stood shaking at a sink with a phone in his hand."Señora Jenny," he said. His English was careful and soft. "I am so sorry."I sat down on the porch swing."He did not wake," Rafael said. "The sun was already up. I went to bring his tea. He was lying on his side with the blanket tucked, and his face was calm. He was almost smiling."I closed my eyes. I thought of a gray quilt, and a white muzzle on an ankle, and a house too quiet to be real."The same way," I whispered. "The same way my mother went.""Yes, Señora.""I was coming in a month.""I know. He kept the calendar by the bed. He had circled the day."The swing creaked. A bird sang in the birches. The world went on, which seemed unforgivable.We flew down together. Macbeth, Joseph, and I.Macbeth held my hand through the whole flight.

Chapter 195: The Long Letter

I turned seventy five on a Tuesday, and the first thing I did was reach for a pen.Gray light lay across the study. Rain tapped the window, and the lake beyond it had gone the color of pewter. I sat at the small desk by the glass with a stack of cream paper in front of me. My hands were thin now. The knuckles had thickened, and the two gold bands hung loose on my finger, held on with a bit of white thread, the way I had once taped Harry's.On the wall behind me hung every frame. A letter in blue ink. A certificate for mud. A mineral with my father's name. A photograph of a man laughing in tall grass.Nobody had come to the house yet. The party was at six. I had a whole quiet morning, and I knew what I wanted to do with it.I wrote the date at the top.To my grandchildren. To Megan, to Henry, and to anyone who arrives after. Open this when I am gone. Not before. I will know if you cheat.I laughed, and my eyes stung, and I kept going.I wrote for six hours.I told them everything. Not

Chapter 196: A Visit From Josh's Daughter

The young woman on my porch had his eyes, and I forgot how to breathe.It was a bright April morning. Wind came off the lake, smelling of cut grass and wet earth. I opened the door in my cardigan with a cup of tea in my hand, and there she stood. Tall, dark haired, with a leather satchel on her shoulder and a recorder in her fist."Mrs. Alejandro?" she said. "I am Nora Whitfield. We spoke on the phone."She had his face. Not exactly. A softer line to the jaw. But the eyes crinkled at the corners before she even smiled. The way a man's had in tall grass, in a photograph I had framed on my desk.My tea trembled. I set it down on the railing."Come in," I said. "Please."She followed me into the kitchen. She was a journalist, thirty two, writing a long piece about the women at the center of the late century corporate scandals. She said it quickly, practiced. I gave her tea and sat across from her. Spring light lay across the table in pale stripes."I want to start with something personal

Chapter 197: The Sale Of The Lake House

The stairs beat me on a Wednesday, and I sat down on the fourth step and laughed so I would not cry.I was eighty one. I had a laundry basket in my arms and a knee that had stopped taking orders. The house stood quiet around me, too tall and too wide. Light fell through the hall window in a long gold bar. Somewhere upstairs a floorboard ticked, though nobody was home. I sat there with the basket in my lap and looked up the staircase I had climbed ten thousand times.It was not the stairs. It was everything the stairs stood for.Four bedrooms. A real kitchen. A dock long enough for two boats, and I had not rowed in six years. The garden my mother planted needed hands I no longer had. Every room held someone who was gone, and I walked through them each morning like a night watchman, checking that the ghosts were comfortable.I called Macbeth that night."Mama," she said. "What is wrong?""Nothing is wrong. I have decided something."I told her I was giving her the house. Not selling it.

Chapter 198: A Quiet Day

The dogwoods opened on a Saturday, and I did not do one single thing about it.I sat on my porch in the blue chair with a cup of tea warming my hands. It was April. I was eighty three. The air smelled of cut grass and wet petals, and the light came low and gold through the branches, laying small bright coins across the floorboards. A breeze lifted the white blossoms and let them drift down onto the lawn like slow snow.I had nowhere to be. I had earned that, too.The street was quiet. A neighbor mowed a lawn two doors away. A mockingbird practiced three different songs in the tree. My knees ached, my hands were thin as paper, and I could hear my own heart in the stillness, slow and steady, a clock that had decided to take its time.Then a door banged, and a small shape tore across the grass.Macbeth's youngest. Four years old. Hair flying, shirt untucked, feet bare and wet from the morning dew. She ran the way my mother once told me a child should run, with her whole body, no care at

Chapter 199: The Last Letter

The woman I used to be sat in a cold office at twenty six, and I could still feel the pen shaking in her hand.It came to me on an ordinary Thursday in the small white cottage. I was eighty four. Rain tapped the porch roof, and the dogwood outside the window had dropped the last of its petals onto the wet grass. My tea steamed beside the lamp. I had not planned to remember. The memory simply walked in and sat down, the way old friends do.A gray room. A long table. Fluorescent lights humming like insects.A man slid a contract across the wood and told me where to sign. I remember the smell of carpet glue and burnt coffee. I remember my stomach turning over like a stone in a river. I remember thinking, I hate this room. I hate this chair. I hate that my hands are doing this while the rest of me stands far away and screams.I signed anyway.My name came out small and crooked. The pen skipped on the last letter. Nobody in that room looked at me. Nobody said, you do not have to. Nobody sa

Chapter 200: The Ending That Was Not The Beginning

Macbeth's POVMy mother died on a Sunday morning, and for once in her life she did not have to be brave alone.I am the one telling this part. She would have wanted it that way. She always said the last page belongs to whoever is still holding the book.It was early spring. The window of her small bedroom stood open a hand's width, and the air that came through smelled of wet grass and dogwood. She lay propped against two pillows in her old gray cardigan, thin as paper, her hair white and loose on the pillow. The quilt was pulled up to her chest. The light was soft.She had told us the week before that she was ready. Not sad. Ready, the way you are ready for a long trip when the bags are packed.I sat on her left and held her hand. Joseph sat on her right and held the other. He had flown in the night before, still smelling of mountain air. His long fingers wrapped around hers, my grandfather's hands holding my mother's.Nobody spoke.She turned her head slowly toward me. Her eyes were

...

15 16 17 18 19 20

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP