HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND의 모든 챕터: 챕터 121 - 챕터 130

We went to the enclosed garden at nine.The Friday morning, the October light doing the honest thing, the hedgerows and the beds and the enclosed space receiving us through the gap in the yew.We sat on the bench.Not the ends. The middle.He looked at the rosemary.I looked at the rosemary.I put my hand in my coat pocket.My fingers closed around the test.I pulled it out.I held it for a moment.Then I put it on the bench between us.He looked at it.He looked at my face.He looked at it again.The enclosed garden.The October morning.Neither of us spoke.The fountain audible from here, the specific sound of it in the cold air, running.He reached out.He picked it up.He looked at it for a long time.His face did not do any of the things I had been cataloguing and categorizing since September. Not the jaw, not the managed version, not the warmth, not the underneath thing. Something I had not seen before. Something entirely new.He set it back down between us.He looked at the ros

BELLA’S POVHe didn’t tell me in the garden.He stood up, pocketed his phone, and looked at the gap in the yew hedge with the quality of a man who had received something large and needed to be in motion before he could think inside it. I watched him and I did not push. I had learned, over three months, that pushing Dominic Hayes toward a thing before he was ready produced the managed version of it, and the managed version was the last thing either of us needed this morning.I picked up the test from the bench.I put it in my coat pocket.We went through the hedge.He made calls from the study for an hour.I went to the library, not to read — I sat in the window and watched the garden and let the morning do what it was doing and thought about the will and the condition and the look on his face when the call came through.The look that had no catalogue entry.I had been building his vocabulary for three months. Every expression, every register, every version of the face that existed bet

BELLA’S POVSaturday morning arrived without ceremony.I woke at seven to the sound of rain — the October kind, the rain that had made up its mind and was not going to be hurried. It hit the window with the flat insistence of weather that intended to stay, the garden below already darkened, the east beds running with water, the fountain indistinguishable from the rain in the general grey.I lay in bed and thought about Monday.Then I thought about Richard.Then I stopped thinking about both of those things because I had promised myself the weekend, or the version of the weekend that was available given everything currently in motion, and lying in bed cataloguing threats at seven in the morning was not the weekend I had in mind.I got up.Dominic was already in the kitchen.Not the suit — the Saturday version, the dark shirt, the version of him that existed when the day had no formal obligations. He was at the counter reading something on his phone with the focused attention of a man a

BELLA’S POVNobody moved.My mother’s coffee was between her hands and she was looking at the table with the quality of a woman who understood that what was about to happen in this kitchen required her stillness more than her presence and was giving it.I looked at Dominic.He looked at the window.The clear Sunday morning outside, the washed light, the garden doing the thing it did after rain — everything slightly more itself, the colors deeper, the fountain louder in the cleaner air.“Tell me,” I said.He looked at his hands on the table.“The night your father died,” he said. “October fourteenth.”I held the edge of the table.“I was in the area,” he said.The kitchen.The Sunday.“What area,” I said.“Prentiss Road,” he said. “Or near it. The neighborhood.” He looked at the window. “I had been to see someone. A client, a former client — it doesn’t matter who. The meeting ran late. I was driving home.”I looked at him.“You were there,” I said.“Not on the road itself,” he said. “T

BELLA’S POV“Don’t let him leave,” Dominic said into the phone.The gate.Daniel Carr, who had been in custody and was now out on bail and had apparently spent his first free morning driving to an estate address he had gotten from somewhere and was standing at the intercom asking to be let through.I stood up.“Sit down,” Dominic said.“No,” I said.He looked at me.“I’m not sitting in the kitchen while Daniel Carr stands at my gate,” I said.“He’s not your gate,” he said.“He’s at the gate of the house I live in,” I said. “Close enough.”He looked at me for a long moment.“Stay behind me,” he said.“I’m not staying behind anyone,” I said.He pressed his lips together.We went to the front door.The gate camera showed Daniel on the small screen by the door — the intercom system, the live feed. I looked at it before we went out.Daniel Carr.Six months since I had seen him. He looked the same and he looked entirely different, the way people looked when you had learned something about t