All Chapters of Wrong Pair of Eyes: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

CHAPTER 11POV: MiaThe east garden at five o’clock was empty.Almost.Ryder was already there, of course he was, sitting on the stone bench at the far end with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the ground. Not his phone. Not a book. Just sitting with whatever was in his head, the way he did when he thought nobody was watching.She stopped at the entrance.Watched him for a moment he didn’t know she was taking.This was the thing about Ryder when his guard was down, when the controlled stillness softened into something more human, he looked like someone carrying weight he’d never once asked anyone else to help with. It sat in his shoulders. In the set of his jaw. In the particular quality of his silence.She’d seen it before.She’d been trying not to think about what it did to her.He looked up.Found her immediately, always immediately, and something in his face shifted. Not relief exactly. More like a door opening.She walked toward him.Stopped two feet away. Close enough to

CHAPTER 13POV: MiaEthan planned the weekend trip on Wednesday.She came home to find him at her desk with his laptop open and that particular focused energy he got when he was organising something, brow slightly furrowed, mouth moving faintly as he read, the same expression he wore when he was untangling a problem he’d decided to solve.“Okay,” he said without looking up. “I found a place. Two hours from here, small town, there’s a lake and apparently the most unreasonable bed and breakfast you’ve ever seen in your life.”She dropped her bag. Leaned against the doorframe. “Unreasonable how?”“Log fire. Four poster bed. Breakfast that takes two hours because there’s that much of it.” He looked up. Grinned. “Just us. Two nights. No campus, no lectures, no—” he gestured broadly at her desk covered in notes, “—whatever disaster this is.”She looked at him.At the grin. At the laptop. At the effort of a person who had flown across the world to surprise her and was now planning a weekend

CHAPTER 15POV: MiaThe last night arrived the way last nights always did.Too fast and too slow at the same time.Ethan cooked. Something elaborate that required three pans and his complete concentration and the particular focused energy he got when he was doing something with his hands. She sat on the kitchen counter and watched him and handed him things when he asked and laughed when he got the seasoning wrong the first time and tried to pretend he hadn’t.The apartment smelled like garlic and something warm and the specific domesticity of a person who was trying to make a last night feel like any other night because the alternative was admitting it was a last night.She loved him for that.She loved him for a lot of things tonight.That was the hardest part, the loving. It would have been cleaner if she’d stopped. If the last three weeks had eroded something. But they hadn’t. If anything they’d reminded her exactly what Ethan was, warm and real and funny and generous and completel

CHAPTER 17 POV: Mia She woke up and he was still there. Not in the way she’d half expected, not awkward, not strange, not the specific discomfort of a morning that regrets the night before. He was simply there. On the other side of her bed, on top of the covers, still fully dressed except for his shoes which were somewhere near the door. He’d fallen asleep reading, her book open face down on the mattress beside him, the lamp still on, his face completely unguarded in sleep. She lay on her side and looked at him for a while. At the book. At the lamp. At the shoes by the door. At the specific reality of Ryder Holt in her bed on a Wednesday morning looking like he’d always been there and her chest doing something enormous and quiet about it. She should feel worse than this. She knew that. She was aware, completely, clearly aware, of what yesterday had been and what it meant and what was coming. The call. The conversation. The thing she owed Ethan that she’d been building toward f

CHAPTER 19POV: MiaFriday morning arrived with the specific audacity of a world that had kept moving while she’d been standing still.Lectures. Deadlines. The ordinary machinery of a university that didn’t pause for personal revelations or relationship endings or the particular seismic shift of finally choosing something true.She had two lectures before noon.Ryder had a seminar at nine.They stood in her kitchen at 7:45am, her with coffee, him with his jacket, the morning doing its ordinary things outside her window, and she thought about how strange it was that Tuesday she’d been standing in this same kitchen in a completely different life and now here she was, four days later, watching him put on his jacket and feeling like the floor had been replaced with something more solid.“Tonight?” he asked.She looked at him.“Tonight,” she confirmed.He crossed to her. Pressed his lips to her temple, brief, warm, deliberate. His hand at her waist for just a moment. Then gone.She stood i