Semua Bab The Substitute Bride He Broke.: Bab 11 - Bab 20

Nora heard the notification from the kitchen.She was standing at the stove with her back to the sitting room, one hand wrapped around the handle of a pot and the other reaching for the wooden spoon she had set on the counter. The sound was faint, just the small, clean chime of her laptop from the other room — but she caught it and immediately looked over her shoulder.Liam was on the floor near the coffee table, arranging and rearranging a set of plastic blocks into a structure that kept collapsing on one side, completely unbothered by the notification. But she knew him. The moment she walked toward the laptop, he would look up, decide he wanted to help, and carry the thing to her at an angle that would make her heart stop."Liam." She raised her voice just enough to reach him. "Do not touch Mummy's laptop."He looked up at her with the expression of a child who had not yet been planning to touch the laptop but was now considering it."Liam.""Okay, Mummy."She turned to Adele, the

She did not stand up when he walked in.That was the first thing, the thing she noticed about herself before she noticed anything about him. Five years ago she would have stood. She would have straightened her jacket and smoothed something and found a reason to move, because his presence in a room had always done something to her posture, something involuntary that she'd hated even then. She stayed in her chair now, arms crossing over her chest, and looked at him the way she had learned to look at things that didn't matter anymore: directly, without flinching, without giving them more weight than they deserved.Caleb Wren.Three years of marriage to this man. Three years of building something she had believed in, a life that had structure and warmth and a future she could see clearly — and then the slow, grinding unravelling of all of it, ending the way it ended, with papers and lawyers and a version of herself she didn't fully recognise walking out of a building into an afternoon th

*NORA*Nora dropped her bag on the couch the moment she got through the door and stood in the middle of her living room for a full minute doing nothing. Just standing. The kind of stillness that happens when your body is home but your mind is still sitting in that office, still watching Caleb Wren struggle to find words, still feeling the strange and uncomfortable sensation of having the upper hand over a man who had spent years making her feel like she had none.She pulled out her phone and called Ashley before she had even taken off her shoes.It rang twice."You sound worried. Somethinf must be wrong. Tell me everything," Ashley said, skipping hello entirely. She always did that. Nora had stopped being surprised by it years ago."He came to my office."A pause. Then, "He what?""He came to my office, Ashley. Caleb. He walked in and sat down and started talking like it was the most normal thing in the world.""Caleb Wren." Ashley's voice had gone up half a pitch. "The Caleb Wren. Yo

The corridor was long and pale and smelled like drugs, antiseptic and of course fear. Nora paced the length of it, turned, paced back. Her heels made small sounds on the linoleum. She counted the ceiling tiles without meaning to and stopped when she realised she was doing it.She had called Ashley before the doctor even finished speaking. Ashley had said she was booking the next flight. She would land in a few hours. Until then it was just Nora and the corridor and the door to Liam's room at the far end.She rubbed her palms up and down her arms. She wasn't cold. The hospital was not cold. She did it anyway, the same stroke again and again, because her body needed something to do and that was all she had.Through the small window in Liam's door she could see the shape of him in the bed. He had fallen asleep again. She could see the slow rise of the blanket over his chest. Up. Down. Up. She watched it the way she used to watch him sleep when he was very small, when she would stand in t

The phone rang four times and then clicked to voicemail.Nora pulled it from her ear and stared at the screen. She wasn't sure what she had expected — that he would pick up on the first ring, maybe, that the universe having dragged her this far would at least grant her that much. But the universe, apparently, was not finished with her yet.She called again.Voicemail.Again.Voicemail.She lowered the phone and stood very still in the corridor with the fluorescent light humming above her and the distant sound of a trolley being wheeled somewhere further down the ward. Her chest was doing something complicated, a mixture of relief and silent dread, both of them at once, layered over each other the way sounds sometimes were, each one distinct, neither one drowning the other out.She tried one more time.The same four rings. The same click. His voice, recorded and clipped, asking her to leave a message.She hung up without leaving one. What would she even say? Hey, Caleb. Our son is in