All Chapters of HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

80 Chapters

CHAPTER 11: HARRY'S RETURN

BELLA'S POVThe call came on a Wednesday.I know it was a Wednesday because I had been marking time in the estate the way you mark time in places you didn't choose, by small domestic landmarks rather than actual days. The Wednesday was the day Petra changed the flowers in the entrance hall from white to pale yellow, which I only noticed because I had been on my way downstairs and the color caught the light differently and for a moment, a very brief and stupid moment, the yellow made me think of a dress I had since returned to the back of the wardrobe.I had returned the dress to the back of the wardrobe on Sunday.Four days of victory was apparently the outer limit of my capacity to sustain a thing without examining it too closely, and on Sunday morning I had examined it too closely and found something I wasn't ready to find, and I had folded the yellow dress very carefully and put it at the far end of the rack behind a silk blouse the color of still water.Then I had gone downstairs

CHAPTER 12: THE KITCHEN MOMENT

BELLA'S POVNot the fractional deceleration of the kitchen moment. An actual, visible stop, one hand on the upper banister, the legal pad in the other, and his eyes moving from my face downward and back with an expression that I could not have named with any precision and that lasted only a moment before the architectural reassembly happened and he was controlled again and the moment was sealed over.Four seconds.I counted them because counting was something to do."Going out?" he said.His voice was the same. I had been bracing for some change in it, some inflection that would require me to respond to it, but it came out in the same measured, even register as always, the voice he used for household rules and breakfast conversation and whatever you were thinking about last night, stop thinking about it."To see a friend," I said.He looked at me for a moment. The documents in his hand were still. "Harry."Not a question. An identification. The name in his mouth was neutral, precis

CHAPTER 13: THE KITCHEN MOMENT CONT’D

He was exactly Harry — dark hair slightly disheveled in the way he never bothered to fix at home, a shirt that had been ironed and then lived in for most of the day, the warm open expression that was the thing I had liked first and liked most consistently. He was good-looking in a real, accessible way, not the kind of way that made rooms recalibrate. The kind that made you feel looked at rather than assessed."Hey," he said, and his face did the thing it always did — broke into the easy smile, the one without calculation."Hey," I said.He held the door wider. I went in.The apartment was warm and smelled of garlic bread — genuine garlic bread, from the Italian place, still in its paper bag on the kitchen counter, which made me smile. The table was set, which was not something Harry typically did, which meant he had thought about tonight in the way that required table-setting, which meant we were on the same page about what tonight was, which was — clarifying, actually. Specific. It m

CHAPTER 14: THE PERFORMANCE BEGINS

BELLA'S POV I heard the car before I saw it. The particular crunch of the estate's gravel driveway had a different quality depending on the vehicle, Gio's SUV had a heavier, more deliberate sound, like something that knew its own weight. The car that pulled up at eleven-fifteen on Saturday morning was lighter, faster, the sound of something arriving with energy rather than authority. Mum. I was in the library. I'd been in the library since nine, which was two hours longer than I'd intended to spend in the library, because my original plan had been to come down, get coffee, go back to my room, and spend the morning in the reliable safety of my own four walls. But the kitchen had not been empty at nine. He'd been at the table with his documents and his coffee and his perfectly composed architectural face, and I had made my coffee and sat at the opposite end of the table because that was the rule now, meals at the family table, no isolation, and we had sat in the particular charge

CHAPTER 15: THE PERFORMANCE BEGINS CONT’D

BELLA'S POV I looked at the library door. He looked at his legal pad. The entrance hall offered nothing useful on the subject of what happened next. "One o'clock," he said, after a moment. "I heard." He went back toward the study. I went back to the library. I picked up my book from the window seat. I looked at the spine. I had no idea what it was about anymore. At five past one, I came downstairs. He was already at the table. Of course he was. He was a man who was on time for everything, I had learned this in the way you learn someone's rhythms when you share a space with them, whether you intend to or not. He was at one end of the long dining table with a glass of water and no documents, which meant he had been deliberate about leaving the documents behind, which meant this was an occasion that required the performance of attention rather than the management of it. His jacket was still on. Armor. I came in and didn't say anything. I pulled out the chair at t

CHAPTER 16: THE PERFORMANCE BEGINS CONT’D

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile, not quite, but the involuntary beginning of something that stopped itself in the architecture of his face before it finished arriving. I'd seen this twice before. I counted it."We won't tell her about the pool schedule," he said."What will we tell her, then?"He considered this. Outside, the bird was still navigating its hedge with enormous determination. "That you've been using the library. That you've been eating at the table. That you've raised approximately four objections to household rules and I've addressed them with patience.""You haven't addressed them with patience.""I've addressed them.""That's not the same thing.""No," he agreed.I ate something. He ate something. The bread was still in his hand, still turned. I watched his hands and then made myself not watch his hands."And the east wing?" I said.He set the bread down."Not at lunch," he said. His voice was still even, it was always even, that was the thin

CHAPTER 17: WHAT HIS BODY DOES WITHOUT PERMISSION

CHAPTER 15: WHAT HIS BODY DOES WITHOUT PERMISSIONBELLA'S POVSunday arrived with the particular quality of light that belongs only to that day.Not better light than Saturday, not worse, just unmistakably Sunday light, which is somehow both fuller and more forgiving than the working week's version, slower to move across the floor, more willing to stay in one place. The curtains in my room were heavy enough to keep most of it out, but some came through the gap at the edge, a thin gold line on the floorboards that had moved approximately four inches by the time I gave up on sleep and lay on my back staring at the ceiling instead.Eight-twelve, according to my phone.Mum would be asleep until at least ten. She had a Sunday habit of sleeping long and well, which she'd always explained as catching up on the week, and which I had always understood as the particular luxury of a woman who ran on company and noise and needed the silence of a long morning to recover from herself. Even in the

CHAPTER 18: WHAT HIS BODY DOES WITHOUT PERMISSION CONT’D

The kitchen was warm, Petra had the underfloor heating on some kind of Sunday schedule, the house a degree or two more comfortable than weekdays, and the light through the window was doing its forgiving Sunday thing, and my hands were around the coffee cup, and I was not thinking about the fraction of a second that had lasted less than a second and in which nothing had technically happened.I was extremely not thinking about it.The document he was reading had at least twelve pages.I could see the stack of them beside his legal pad, and he'd been on approximately the fourth page when I'd come in, which meant, by any reasonable estimate of his reading speed, which I had had no reason to calculate but had apparently calculated anyway, he should have moved to page six by now.He was on page four.I looked at my coffee.He turned the page. To page five. He read approximately half of it. His hand came to the coffee cup. He drank. He set it down. He looked at the page.He went back to

CHAPTER 19: THE CORRIDOR

BELLA'S POVIt was the kind of thing that wouldn't have happened in a different house.That's what I kept coming back to afterward, sitting on the edge of my bed with my book in my lap and the corridor outside my door entirely silent and entirely finished with its business: it was the architecture. The estate was enormous in its open spaces, the entrance hall, the dining room, the library with its tall windows and its generous light, but its connecting corridors were another thing entirely. Narrow, purposeful, built in an era when corridors were understood to be passages rather than spaces, designed for movement rather than occupancy. You moved through them single file or you negotiated.The corridor outside the library was the narrowest in the main house. I had noticed this on my first full day at the estate, when I'd been learning the building's geography room by room, mapping its logic against my own spatial memory. The corridor connected the library to the back staircase on one

CHAPTER 20: THE SPACE

BELLA'S POV The letting-go was deliberate, I could feel it, the conscious decision, the hand releasing in the particular way of something that has been told to release rather than something that wanted to. Under two seconds of contact, total. Probably under one and a half. He stepped back. I stayed where I was. The corridor was twelve inches wider than it had been a moment ago and the twelve inches felt like a significant quantity of space. "Sorry," he said. His voice was exactly the same. The perfect, practiced level of it, the register that never changed, that I had been learning to read underneath for weeks. Under the evenness, something was working. "It's fine," I said. "The notepad…" "I have it." He bent and picked it up from the floor. He straightened and held it out. I took it, and our hands didn't touch, the exchange was clean and careful, both of us having apparently decided that a second instance of contact was not something the corridor needed, and I added it

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