HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND의 모든 챕터: 챕터 101 - 챕터 110

BELLA’S POVI woke up at seven and lay in the dark and thought: twenty.Not dramatically. The quiet acknowledgment of a number that had been approaching for six days like weather and had now arrived. Twenty. The last argument unavailable. The flower done and the leaves coming and the order of things proceeding on its own terms.I pressed both hands flat on the duvet.Twenty.Outside the window the October Saturday was doing the thing October Saturdays did — arriving with the particular quality of a weekend in the season’s best month, the light that had learned from the week and had come back better, the specific clarity of it. I could hear the fountain. The east beds would be in the morning light. The rosemary in the enclosed garden would smell of itself in the cold.I got up.My mother was in the kitchen at seven-thirty.Not the dressing gown this time. Dressed, composed, the quality of a woman who had decided that her daughter’s birthday was an occasion that required the full versio

BELLA’S POVI woke up at seven and lay in the dark and thought: twenty. Still.The second morning of it.The ceiling doing what ceilings did and the October Sunday outside the window doing what October Sundays did and the house around me in its morning configuration. I lay in the dark and I ran the inventory of the night before with the attention of someone who wanted to make sure it had been real and not the dream version of a thing.The dining room.The birthday candles.His hands on my face.The unmanaged version.Finally.Real.I pressed both hands flat on the duvet.Real.I went downstairs at seven-thirty.The kitchen was empty.Not for long — I heard the rear door at seven forty-two, the run, the kitchen, the water. His steps. The sequence I had memorized in the first weeks without trying to and had been carrying ever since.He came through the kitchen door and stopped.Not the fraction of a second. The full stop, the Sunday morning stop of a man encountering the person he had

BELLA’S POVThe four of us went through the gap in the yew hedge at ten-thirty.My mother first, then Jennifer, then me, then Dominic — the single-file requirement of the gap, the narrow entrance that opened into the enclosed space, the forty-year garden receiving us one at a time.My mother stopped when she came through.She looked around the space with the looking of someone encountering it for the first time — she had been in the formal garden a hundred times but not here, not the enclosed space behind the hedge. She looked at the low stone edging and the slightly overgrown beds and the bench at the correct angle and the rosemary in its corner.She looked at the rosemary.“How old?” she said.“Thirty years at least,” I said.She went to it.She put her hand on the old wood at the base the way I had, the way Jennifer had, the way Marcus had. The specific gesture that the plant seemed to produce in everyone who encountered it — the instinctive reach toward the thick bark, the acknowl

BELLA’S POVNobody moved for a moment.The enclosed garden holding its quality — the forty-year space, the bench, the rosemary, the meadow beyond — now containing five people instead of two, the configuration entirely wrong, the safe space breached by people who did not know it was a safe space and would not have cared if they had.Dominic reached me in four steps.Not rushing — the controlled movement of a man covering distance with the specific efficiency of someone who has assessed a situation and decided where he needs to be. He stood beside me and I felt the quality of the standing, the specific body-language of it, the positioning of a man who had placed himself between something and something else.I looked up at him.He looked at Richard.“How did you get in?” he said.The hard voice. The cold efficient version.“The gate was open,” Richard said. “The security man let us through. Mum called ahead.”Dominic looked at his mother.Elaine Hayes was looking at me.Not the assessing

BELLA’S POVMarcus replied in four minutes.I was still in the sitting room, the conversation continuing around me — my mother and Elaine finding the specific warm register of two women who were too socially skilled to be openly uncomfortable with each other, Richard talking to Dominic in the low contained way of two men who had a history and were managing it in public.I looked at my phone under the chair’s arm.What do you mean Richard knew about the enclosed garden.I typed: He came directly there. Didn’t come to the house first. Knew exactly where we were.The typing indicator for a long time.Then: Catherine.One word.I looked at it.Catherine told him? I typed.Not intentionally, Marcus sent back. Catherine and Richard have known each other for years. She visited the estate in October. She would have mentioned the garden. She wouldn’t have known he’d use it.I looked at the window.Catherine Marsh.Who had come through the rear door on a Sunday morning to see what there was to