All Chapters of HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

80 Chapters

CHAPTER 21: THE SPACE CONT’D

DOMINIC'S POVHe read the paragraph four times.He was aware that he was reading it four times. This was, he thought, the specific quality of a particular kind of problem: not that it escaped your notice, but that noticing it did nothing to resolve it. You read the paragraph and you knew you'd read it and you read it again and the words arranged themselves correctly on the page and entered his eyes and went nowhere from there because the space they needed to occupy was currently occupied.His hand on his pen was still.The study was quiet, the particular afternoon quiet of a house with two people in it at opposite ends, each ostensibly occupied. From here he couldn't hear the library, which was the correct distance and the correct level of wall between them. He couldn't hear her.This did not mean he wasn't aware of her.He set the pen down.He looked at his hand.Nothing remarkable about the hand. A hand that had picked up a legal pad from a corridor floor, that had steadied a perso

CHAPTER 22: THE DRESS CODE

BELLA'S POVI want to be clear about the top.It was linen. Pale blue, the color of something that had been washed many times and was better for it, the particular softness of fabric that has reached its final, best version of itself through use rather than design. I had bought it the summer before last from a market stall between a woman selling preserves and a man selling second-hand paperbacks, and I had worn it to three different outdoor events and one very long afternoon in Jennifer's garden and once to a family barbecue where my father had said you look nice and gone back to his book, which was his highest form of aesthetic endorsement.It was sleeveless.That was the entirety of its controversy. Not low-cut, the neckline was entirely unremarkable, the kind of modest scoop that communicated nothing about the person wearing it. Not short, it sat at my waist with the well-behaved geometry of a garment that had no interest in causing problems. Just sleeveless. My shoulders were

CHAPTER 23: THE DRESS CODE CONT’D

Mum said: "Right, well, that's sorted then. Bridget, on the other hand—" she picked up the thread of her earlier story, the easy conversational instinct of a woman who knew how to smooth a surface, and Dominic responded to something she said about the fabric supplier and the table returned to its normal rhythms and I ate my dinner and looked at the window and did not look at him.He did not look at me.He did not look at my shoulders for the entire meal.After dinner, Mum stayed at the table with her wine. She had a habit of doing this, lingering after the food was finished, finishing her glass, the comfortable extension of an evening she was enjoying. She waved Petra away. She settled in.Dominic excused himself. Documents to review, he said, the language of a man who always had documents to review, which was true and also a sentence that could mean several things depending on what a person needed it to mean.He went.I watched him go and turned back to my water glass."He's very pa

CHAPTER 24: JENNIFER VISITS

BELLA'S POV Jennifer arrived on a Thursday at half past two with a weekend bag, strong opinions about the estate's gate intercom system, and the particular energy of a person who has been waiting for a long time to see something with their own eyes. I met her at the front steps. She came through the gate — Gio had let her in, the intercom thing having been resolved — and walked up the driveway the way Jennifer walked everywhere: like she was conducting a survey of the territory, her eyes moving and cataloguing and forming conclusions at a rate that her face reported nothing of. She was small and quick and had dark skin and close-cut hair and the look of someone who had decided at some point in adolescence that the most efficient use of her attention was to watch and listen and speak only when the observation was complete. We had been friends since we were fifteen. I knew the difference between Jennifer watching something casually and Jennifer watching something with intent.

CHAPTER 25: SEES EVERYTHING

BELLA'S POV Not to my mother first, not to Jennifer, to me. The automatic geography of it, the same way he poured my water before I asked and served my plate and had apparently somewhere in the last several weeks developed a functional map of what I needed at a table and moved accordingly.I took the bread without looking at him.Jennifer watched me take the bread.I did not look at Jennifer.He talked to my mother about her work. His eyes were on her, my mother, attentive and warm, and I ate and looked at the window and thought about nothing, the disciplined nothing I had been practicing, and I was aware with every molecule of my peripheral vision of exactly where he was at the table and exactly what angle his hands were at and exactly how far three chairs felt in a room this size.Jennifer watched.She did not appear to be watching. She was talking about her job, something about the new semester, a lecturer she found interesting, and her eyes were on my mother and she was laug

CHAPTER 26: THE HALLWAY AT NIGHT

BELLA'S POVJennifer was asleep by midnight.I knew this because her room was two doors from mine and the particular quality of silence that came through the wall had shifted, the active quiet of someone lying awake in an unfamiliar place becoming the deeper, more settled quiet of someone who had stopped listening to the house and let go of the day. Jennifer slept well when she allowed herself to sleep. It was the allowing that took her time.I had been listening to the house for considerably longer.I checked my phone — one forty-seven in the morning had the specific quality of a space that has been occupied by wakefulness for long enough that the wakefulness has become the room's weather. The ceiling was the same ceiling it was every night. The curtain gap had its thin line of grounds light. The duvet was warm on one side and I had turned to the other side three times now looking for the cooler half and finding it diminishing.I had been thinking about what Jennifer said.You alrea

CHAPTER 27: SEES EVERYTHING CONT’D

I was acutely, completely aware that this was true. One of us needed to take the step that broke the geography of the junction and returned the corridor to a corridor, a functional passage between rooms, a domestic thoroughfare, the kind of space you moved through rather than occupied. One of us needed to decide that the practical requirement of the grip was fully and completely met and act on that decision.He stepped back.The step was deliberate, I could feel it in the quality of the movement, the same way I'd felt the deliberateness of the release in the corridor outside the library, the conscious decision in the hands. He stepped back and his hands moved from my shoulders and the twelve inches of space re-established themselves and the corridor became its correct width.He let go.I stood where I was.The absence of his hands on my shoulders had a temperature. That was the thing I registered in the first second of the space between us, the specific coolness where warmth had be

CHAPTER 28: HIS STUDY DOOR

BELLA'S POVJennifer left on Sunday afternoon.She hugged me at the front steps the same way she'd hugged me when she arrived — fully, with her whole attention, and she said nothing of consequence while Gio loaded her bag into the car, talking instead about the showerhead and the bread and the garden, the pleasant surface of a good weekend visit. She said goodbye to my mother with genuine warmth. She said goodbye to Dominic with the measured, civil courtesy she'd maintained since Thursday, which was not unfriendliness but was the specific quality of someone who had completed an assessment and was keeping its results private.At the car door she turned back to me.She looked at me for a moment.She said: "Text me.""I will," I said.She looked at me one moment longer, the full Jennifer look, the one that contained everything she wasn't saying out loud because she had decided, somewhere in the course of the weekend, that the not-saying was the correct strategy. Then she got in the car

CHAPTER 29: HIS STUDY DOOR CONT’D

Not everything — four inches of open door was four inches of visible room, a slice of it, the angle showing the desk and the chair and the lamp and a portion of the bookshelves behind. His desk, which I knew well by now — the documents and the legal pad and the two laptops and the ordered occupation of a man who worked seriously. The lamp, which was on, which was always on, the warm amber cone of it over the desk.And him.He was reading.Jacket off — it was always off by this hour, the jacket was for the day, for meetings, for the dinner table. The shirt, which I had by now catalogued in several iterations, was dark tonight, charcoal or navy in the lamp light, the sleeves rolled to just below the elbow. He was sitting forward in the chair, not the full forward intensity of deep focus, but the easy forward of someone in the middle of something and comfortable with it, his forearms on the desk, the document in his hands.He was reading.I watched him turn a page.The movement was unhu

CHAPTER 30: THE POOL

BELLA'S POVThe pool was the best discovery I had made in this house.Not the most significant, significance was a category occupied by other rooms, other corridors, other hours, but the best in the specific sense of: the thing that had given me back something I hadn't realized I was missing. I had swum since I was nine. My father had taught me at the local leisure centre, Saturday mornings, the chlorine smell of the changing rooms and his voice from the pool's edge saying reach, pull, reach, pull until the stroke was in my body rather than my head and I stopped thinking about it and just moved. I had swum through school and stopped when university started and the available hours contracted around essays and Jennifer and the particular social geometry of a new place, and I had not swum in over a year before I found the door I hadn't tried yet.The estate's pool was indoor, a room attached to the main building through a corridor off the gym, which I had also not explored until the t

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