My Sister’s Substitute 의 모든 챕터: 챕터 91 - 챕터 100

They didn't talk about it the first night.Not because there was nothing to say — there was everything to say, the kind of everything that sat in a room and took up all the available space and made the air feel different. But some things needed to be felt before they could be spoken and they were both still in the feeling part and talking would have been a shortcut neither of them was ready for.So they were just there.Together in the master suite with the night outside the window and the house quiet around them and the weight of Anna's absence settling into the space like something learning where it lived.Irina lay on her back. Neo lay beside her.Not sleeping. None of them was sleeping. Just present. Side by side in the dark with their breathing and their thoughts and the occasional sound of the city far below doing its indifferent nighttime thing.At some point he found her hand under the blanket. She held it.They stayed like that until morning.The second day was the practical

The surgeon came out at eleven forty.A tall woman in scrubs, mask pulled down, the composed efficiency of someone who had just been doing something important and was transitioning back to the world of people who needed information.She looked at Irina."Mrs. McKinney," she said. "I'm Dr. Reeves. I've been with your husband." Irina stood up.Sasha stood up beside her."He's in surgery," Dr. Reeves said. "The bullet entered his left side — it missed the major organs but there's significant internal bleeding and we need to address that." She said it cleanly, without decoration, the way Irina had learned to appreciate medical people saying difficult things. "He's stable for now. The next few hours are critical but he's strong and we're doing everything we need to do.""Is he going to be okay," Irina said.Dr. Reeves looked at her steadily. "I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure of that," she said. "That's what I can give you right now."Which was honest.Which was not the s

It started with a blog post.Not the same blog that had run the original story about the contract marriage — a different one, smaller, the kind that existed specifically to say things that larger outlets had decided required more evidence before printing. Someone had fed them a narrative and they'd run it with the enthusiasm of a publication that had never once let caution get in the way of a good story.The headline was: WAS NEO MCKINNEY'S CONTROVERSIAL WIFE THE REAL TARGET? SOURCES SUGGEST BILLIONAIRE TOOK BULLET FOR WOMAN WHO BROUGHT DANGER TO HIS DOOR.It had Lawrence's fingerprints all over it.Irina read it at six in the morning at the kitchen island and set her phone down and drank her ginger tea and looked at the scuff near the cabinet and breathed.Mrs. Paulson appeared with eggs."Thank you," Irina said."Of course Mrs. McKinney," Mrs. Paulson said. They didn't discuss the blog post. By eight it had been picked up by two larger outlets.By nine Claudette had called twice an

The funeral was on a Thursday.Small, like Anna would have wanted — or like Irina decided Anna would've wanted, which was the burden of planning something for someone who could no longer tell you their preferences. A chapel on the north side of Atlanta. Pale flowers, not white, Anna had always thought white funeral flowers were depressing, had said so once at someone else's funeral in the particular Anna way of saying things that were true and slightly inconvenient. So pale pink and cream instead. Something with life to it.Forty people.Family — what was left of it, which was Irina and the McKinneys and the complicated shape of what that meant now. A few of Anna's colleagues, people from her professional life who had known the polished version and were here to pay their respects to it. Dr. Osei came, which Irina hadn't expected and which landed somewhere when she saw him in the third row.Neo was there.He shouldn't have been — Dr. Reeves had opinions about how recently he'd been sho

He had actually started it from the hospital.She found this out on a Thursday morning when Gerald called about paperwork and mentioned, in the passing way Gerald mentioned things that turned out to be significant, that the New Zealand end of the Zara situation was progressing well and the legal team in Auckland had received Mr. McKinney's instructions and were moving accordingly.She looked at the phone after Gerald hung up.Then she looked at Neo across the kitchen of the quiet north side property where he was eating toast and reading something on his laptop with the focused morning energy of a man whose body was still recovering and whose brain had entirely declined to participate in the recovery."Gerald just told me the Auckland legal team has your instructions," she said. He looked up."You called lawyers in New Zealand from your hospital bed," she said."I called Gerald," he said. "Gerald called the lawyers.""Neo!!""You said we needed to get her here," he said simply. "I was