Lahat ng Kabanata ng Ex-Husband's Regret: Your Uncle Wants Me Now: Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

Sophie's POVAres walked in wearing a dark suit that fit him like it had been made specifically for that body, which it probably had been. He moved the way he always moved — unhurried, completely at ease, like a man who had never once in his life needed to make himself smaller to fit a room. His grey eyes swept the table once.When they found me, he smiled.Not a performance. Not the bright, calculated smile Rosa used like a weapon. Something quieter. Like a private acknowledgment that only I was supposed to catch."Good morning, Sophie."Heat moved up my face before I could stop it. I gave him a small nod and looked back at my plate.Beside me, Derek went completely still.The air changed. Something invisible and dangerous moved into the room and settled over the table like pressure before a storm.Ares pulled out the empty chair across from Lana and sat down with the ease of a man taking his usual seat in his usual home."What are you doing here." Derek's voice was not a question. I

Sophie's POVStay close to me.I held those words carefully in my chest, the way you hold something you know is fragile and might not survive being gripped too tight.And then his thumb moved. Just once. A slow, small sweep across the inside of my arm where his hand still rested. Barely anything. The kind of touch that in another life, another marriage, might have been unconscious. But in this one, between us, it landed like a whole sentence.Then he let go.The warmth of his hand disappeared and the cool hallway air moved into its place immediately and I stood there and told myself very firmly to breathe normally.I wanted to believe it meant something. That small careful touch. The way he had said stay close like it mattered to him where I was. The fact that he had turned toward me at all in a hallway he could have walked straight through.But I had learned — slowly, painfully, over the full length of two years — what hope cost in this house. I knew exactly what it felt like to reac

Sophie’s POVI was on the balcony.That was the first thing I knew — the cold stone railing under my hands, the night air pressing dark and heavy against my face, the vast drop below me falling away into nothing. The grounds of the Callahan estate spread out far beneath, small and distant and quiet, lit only by the pale security lights that lined the garden paths.Then I heard them behind me.Derek and Ares.Their voices were low at first, the way men's voices go when the anger in them has moved past shouting and into something more concentrated and more dangerous. I turned from the railing and they were there — standing close, closer than two people stand when things are still civil, the space between them already charged with something that had no good ending."I said stay away from her." Derek's voice was barely above a growl. His jaw was tight, his hands at his sides, and the look on his face was one I had never seen from him before. Not cold. Not distant. Something rawer than tha

Sophie’s POVHe turned the whisky glass slowly between his fingers. Long fingers. Steady hands. I noticed this in the peripheral way you notice things you're trying not to look at directly."You can ask me anything, Sophie."There it was again. My name in his mouth. He said it like it had specific weight, like he had considered it and decided it deserved the full space of being spoken properly. Nobody said my name like that. Nobody in this house said it at all, most days.I made myself hold his gaze. "Were you following me that day? Before you stopped?"He didn't look away. Didn't shift. Just held my eyes with that steady, unhurried attention that made me feel simultaneously seen and dangerously exposed."No," he said. "I wasn't following you.""But you knew where I lived." I kept my voice even. "I didn't tell you. I said almost nothing in that car and you drove me straight home."The rain moved against the window in a long, slow gust. The stove light held its warm circle on the count

Sophie’s POVIt had been a week since Ares Callahan walked into our lives and quietly, methodically, began taking them apart and putting them back together in a different shape.Seven days. And in those seven days the house had changed in ways that were difficult to name precisely but impossible to miss if you had lived in it long enough to know its original texture. There was a different quality to the air now. A different current running underneath the usual rhythms of the place. Like a room where someone has moved all the furniture back exactly where it was but you still know, somehow, that everything has been touched.I had seen Ares three times since the kitchen.Once in the hallway outside the study, where he had been on a phone call, moving past with the focused energy of a man in the middle of something that required his full attention. He had looked up as I came around the corner and for one second our eyes had met — that same direct, unhurried contact that I was apparently n