Midnight Debt: Never His, Always His のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 6

REINAI should have taken the main road.That's the thought that keeps circling back to me now, sitting on my bathroom floor with my back against the cold tub and my knees pulled to my chest. I should have taken the main road. It adds seven minutes to the walk home from the bakery, and after a nine-hour shift my feet always hate me by the time I reach the front door, but seven minutes and sore feet is a small price to pay for staying alive.I should have taken the main road. But I didn't today.I press the back of my head against the tub and close my eyes and try to put the last forty minutes in order because my brain keeps skipping over certain parts like I’m beginning to develop amnesia.I was almost home. The bakery smell was still in my hair and I was thinking about nothing more significant than whether there was anything left in the fridge worth eating when I heard them.Not footsteps. Not voices. Something lower than both. A sound that didn't belong on a city street, in a reside

REINAMy father has a tell.Most people who know him wouldn't catch it. But I've been watching him my whole life and I know the tell. It's in his hands. When things are bad, really bad, he sets them flat on the table in front of him like he's trying to hold something down.Both hands. Flat on the table.That's how I know, before he says a single word, that whatever is in the letter he's been staring at since I came downstairs for breakfast is not something either of us is going to recover from quickly.I pour my coffee, sit down across from him and wait.My father is not a weak man. I want to be clear about that because what happens next could make him look like one and he isn't.He is a man who made one terrible decision twenty years ago when he was desperate and young and didn't fully understand what he was agreeing to. He has been paying for it in installments ever since, in sleepless nights and careful conversations and the specific way he flinches every time someone mentions the

REINANobody tells you what it actually feels like.The movies give you nerves and flowers and a father crying at the end of the aisle and a groom who looks at you like you just answered a question he's been asking his whole life. The reality…my reality is a borrowed dress and eleven minutes and a man who signs a document with the same energy he'd bring to a parking permit.It took Eleven minutes and I was legally, permanently, irrevocably the wife of a man who didn't look at me once during his own vows.Not once.I watched Zaden Cole during those eleven minutes the way I watch everything that threatens me.He is tall. Broader than I expected, though I don't know what I expected. He wore a black suit that fit him the way expensive things fit people who are used to expensive things. Dark hair, cut close on the sides. A jaw that looked like it had never accommodated an uncertain expression.And his eyes.His eyes were the coldest thing in the room, which is saying something because the