HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND의 모든 챕터: 챕터 111 - 챕터 120

BELLA’S POVJennifer left Monday morning.She stood at the front door with her bag and the overnight case and the empty champagne bottle she was apparently taking home as a trophy, and she looked at me with the full attention she had been directing at this house and everyone in it since Saturday noon.“I’ve been processing,” she said. “Since the birthday dinner. The speech. The table. All of it.”“And?” I said.“I have thoughts,” she said.“Tell me on the phone,” I said.“There are too many thoughts for the phone,” she said. “I need at least a coffee and a table.”“Soon,” I said.She looked at me.She looked past me into the entrance hall, where Dominic was at the study door with a document, and she looked back at me with the Jennifer look — the one that catalogued everything and stored it and would produce it back at a moment of her choosing.“He looks at you differently now,” she said quietly.“I know,” I said.“Not the almost-look,” she said. “The actual look.”“I know,” I said.“I

BELLA’S POVI dressed carefully on Tuesday morning.Not the silk blouse. Not the performance of a wardrobe choice weighted with meaning. The dark navy shirt I had brought from before this house, the one that fit the way things fit when they knew you, the one that said: this is a person who knows what she’s doing here.I looked in the mirror.Twenty years old.Thomas Morgan’s daughter.I went downstairs.Dominic was at the kitchen counter with coffee and the contained energy of a man who had somewhere to be and was ready for it. He looked at me when I came through and the look had the quality I was still adjusting to — the open version, the one without the managed architecture around it.“Ready?” he said.“Yes,” I said.My mother came through from the corridor in the good coat, the interview coat.I looked at her.“I’m coming,” she said.I stared at her.“To Reeves,” she said. “I’m coming.”“Mum—”“Thomas was my husband,” she said. The flat certain delivery. “I am coming.”I looked at

BELLA’S POVThe two weeks before the hearing moved differently from every other two weeks I had spent in the house.Not slowly. Not the suspended quality of the thirty-six hours or the charged quality of the birthday week. These two weeks had momentum — the sense of something moving toward its conclusion, the legal machinery grinding forward with the specific patience of a process that had been set in motion and was not going to stop.Reeves called every other day.The updates were technical and precise — the challenge to the evidence was being heard, the procedural arguments made, Raines’s legal team doing what Raines’s legal team did. Reeves countered each move with the flat professional certainty of a man who had been building this case for two years and was not going to watch it dismantled by expensive lawyers on a technicality.My statement stood.Harry’s testimony was admitted.The witness from Prentiss Road gave her account in a formal deposition that Reeves described as flawle

BELLA’S POVI didn’t tell him.Wednesday passed with the thought running underneath everything like a second frequency — the ordinary surface of the day and beneath it the four days, now five, the quiet arithmetic of something that was probably nothing and had taken up residence in the back of my mind with the specific tenacity of things you couldn’t unknow once you’d thought them.I went to the pharmacy on Wednesday afternoon.I didn’t tell anyone.I drove my mother’s car to the village with the specific purposeful quality of someone running an errand and I bought a test with the flat efficiency of a person managing a practical problem and I brought it home and I put it in the back of the wardrobe behind the things I had brought from before the house.I didn’t take it yet.Not before the hearing.One thing at a time.Thursday arrived grey.The October grey of a day that had decided against sunlight without being hostile about it, the flat even light of a sky doing its quiet work. The

BELLA’S POVI woke up before five and lay in the dark and held the knowledge the way you held something fragile — carefully, with both hands, aware of the weight of it.The test was in my coat pocket.I had put it there before bed without thinking, the instinctive move of someone who needed the thing close but not visible, not on the bedside table or the desk where it could be seen. In the pocket. Against my side.I pressed my hand flat on my stomach.Nothing felt different.That was the strange part — nothing in my body had announced itself, nothing had changed in the physical landscape of the morning. The same ceiling, the same October dark outside, the same fountain sound drifting up from the garden.Everything the same.Everything different.I thought about telling him.I rehearsed it, the way you rehearsed things at four in the morning when sleep had made itself unavailable — the words, the arrangement of the sentences, the version of the conversation that produced the least dama