All Chapters of HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

80 Chapters

CHAPTER 61: THE PULL

BELLA’S POVHe didn’t come back to the library.I sat on the window seat for ten minutes after he walked out, which was approximately nine minutes and fifty seconds longer than my dignity should have allowed, and I knew this and I sat there anyway. The cushion was warm where he’d been. I was aware of this with the specific awareness of a nineteen year old who had been sitting close to someone she wanted and was now sitting in the warm space they’d left behind, which was pathetic, which I acknowledged, which did not make me move.The garden outside was doing its late afternoon thing.I was not looking at the garden.I was looking at the door he had walked through and I was replaying the phone ringing with the specific resentment of someone who had been interrupted at the worst possible moment and was not mature enough yet to be philosophical about it. The worst possible moment. His face doing the thing, the unmanaged thing, and the distance between us on the window seat being the dista

CHAPTER 62: THE PULL CONT’D

I couldn’t sleep.This was not the five-thirty calibrated wakefulness of a person whose body had decided the night was over. This was the other kind, the specific wakefulness of someone whose mind had not agreed to stop yet, the ceiling getting the full inventory of the day on repeat. The window seat. The said thing. His face. The phone. Marcus. The library door. Dinner. The refilled wine. My mother looking at her glass.I turned over.I turned back.I looked at the ceiling.At eleven forty-five I got up.Not for a reason. The getting up of a person who has been lying in the dark long enough that lying in the dark is no longer preferable to anything else. I pulled on the oversized shirt I slept in, the old one, soft from washing, the one from before this house. I went to the window.The garden at night.Different from the day, the specific quality of the estate after dark, the grounds going quiet in a way they didn’t during the day. The fountain was still running — it ran through the

CHAPTER 63: JENNIFER

BELLA’S POVI heard him leave for the run at six-forty.I had been awake since five. Not the ceiling wakefulness, not the thinking kind — the other kind, the kind that lived in the body rather than the mind, the specific physical alertness of someone whose nervous system had not fully stood down from the night before. I lay in the dark and I listened to the house and at six-forty his door opened and his steps went down the corridor and the rear door closed behind him and I exhaled for what felt like the first time since the kitchen.One step.I had been trying, since I’d gotten back into bed at midnight, to think about it with the analytical distance of someone assessing a situation rather than the body-knowledge of someone who had been standing three feet away from it. The analysis kept failing. Every time I assembled the distance the kitchen came back — the dark, the fountain sound, the undone shirt, the night version of him, the one step and the stop, and the way passing him in the

CHAPTER 64: JENNIFER CONT’D

I gave her the tour.The house received Jennifer the way it received everything, with its particular quality of established permanence, the rooms doing what they always did regardless of who was moving through them. Jennifer moved through them with the specific Jennifer quality, the noticing, the commentary, the way she had always been in spaces — fully present in them, reading them with the attention of someone who believed houses told you things.The library.The sitting room.The formal dining room, which she looked at for a long time.“You eat here every night?” she said.“Yes,” I said.She looked at the table. The length of it. The three places that would be set at seven.“With your mum,” she said.“Yes,” I said.“And her husband,” she said.“Yes,” I said.She looked at the table.She looked at me.I kept my face doing the normal face.She said nothing yet. This was the Jennifer method — the looking, the filing, the saying nothing until she had enough to say something worth sayin

CHAPTER 65: FRIDAY

BELLA’S POVJennifer slept in the guest room next to mine.I knew she was awake at seven because I heard her moving, the specific Jennifer morning sounds, the person who had never once in four years of knowing her been a slow riser. She was one of those people whose body treated sleep as an administrative task — completed efficiently, without ceremony, and set aside.I had slept badly.Not the kitchen badly, not the ceiling badly. The other kind, the half-sleep of someone whose body kept returning them to consciousness at irregular intervals to check whether the situation had changed. It hadn’t. The situation was the same situation it had been at midnight when Jennifer held my hand and we looked at the study light together. Nothing had resolved overnight. Nothing was going to.I got up.Jennifer was already in the kitchen when I came down.She and Petra were in what appeared to be the middle of a conversation about something involving the garden, the specific warm exchange of two peop

CHAPTER 66: FRIDAY CONT’D

She turned to look at me.“He’s not playing,” she said. “That’s what I saw yesterday. A man who is not playing games. Who is genuinely.” She stopped. “That almost makes it worse.”I looked at my hands.“He said I’m nineteen,” I said. “Like it was an argument.”“It’s not an irrelevant point,” Jennifer said.“I know how old I am,” I said.“I know you know,” she said. “But he’s what, forty? He’s been alive twice as long as you. He’s already made his mistakes and learned from them and you’re still in the part where you make yours.”I said nothing.“And his mistake,” she said carefully, “would be you.”The word landed in the enclosed garden and I sat with it and the October morning sat with it and the bench held us both and the rosemary was in Jennifer’s hand and the fountain was running somewhere beyond the hedge.I said: “And mine would be him.”She looked at me.“Yes,” she said.We sat with that.After lunch Jennifer found me in the library.She came in and closed the door and leaned ag

CHAPTER 67: MARCUS

BELLA’S POVJennifer left Saturday morning.She had a thing, she said. A prior commitment she couldn’t move, the specific apologetic energy of someone who genuinely wished they could stay and was also possibly relieved to be leaving before the weekend’s main event. She stood in the entrance hall with her bag and her coat and she hugged me the way she’d hugged me when I came downstairs on Thursday, the real kind, the kind that meant something.“Call me,” she said into my shoulder.“Every day,” I said.She pulled back. Looked at me with the full Jennifer look, the inventory, the reading.“Be careful,” she said.Not about Marcus. The word careful contained its full range, the whole situation, the house and everyone in it.“I’m always careful,” I said.She gave me the look that sentence deserved.Then she was gone. Gio and the car and the drive, and I stood in the entrance hall and watched the gate close and felt the specific quality of a person who has just watched their pressure valve d

CHAPTER 68: MARCUS CONT’D

Dinner was extraordinary.Not the food, though the food was Petra’s best. The dynamic of it, the chemistry that Marcus introduced into the dinner table configuration. He sat across from me, my mother’s right, and he talked with the easy authority of someone who had been at dinner tables his whole life and knew exactly what they were for.He told stories.Good ones, the kind that had been refined through repetition into their best version — funny and specific, the details exactly right, the kind of story that made you feel you had been in the room when it happened. My mother laughed. Dominic made the compressed thing, the almost-smile, more than once.I laughed too.Genuinely. The unmanaged kind, the laugh that arrived before you’d decided to have it.Marcus noticed.He noticed everything. That was the thing about him, the specific gift and the danger — he noticed the way some people breathed, automatically, continuously, without choosing to. He noticed my mother reaching for Dominic’s

CHAPTER 69: THE STUDY

BELLA’S POVI lasted forty minutes.Forty minutes of the ceiling and the dark and the study light visible from the window and the specific impossible patience of a nineteen year old who had just been told her father’s name by a man who had then been silenced by another man who had looked afraid. Forty minutes.Then I got up.I didn’t go to the kitchen this time.I went to the study door.Not his study, the ground floor one, the one my mother had claimed for her calls. The other study, the east wing, the room with the three inch lamp, the room I had been not-entering for eight weeks with a consistency I had been privately proud of.The door was not at three inches tonight.It was closed.I could hear them through it. Not words, the register of two voices, the quality of a conversation that had been going on for a while and had arrived somewhere neither of them had wanted to arrive. Marcus’s voice carried more than Dominic’s — the volume of him, even lowered, even in a closed-door conv

CHAPTER 70: THE STUDY CONT’D

The study at midnight.I had never been inside it. Eight weeks in this house and I had never crossed this threshold, had been past it a hundred times in the corridor, had seen the lamp at three inches, had catalogued the amber quality of it from the east corridor. Inside it was smaller than I had imagined. Warmer. The shelves on two walls, the desk, the lamp — the lamp, which from inside the room was simply a lamp on a desk and from the corridor was a whole architecture of meaning. Books I recognized from passing the shelves through the gap. The desk oh with the legal pads, the documents, the pen placed at the specific angle of a man with habits.Dominic was at the desk.Not sitting. Standing behind it, the chair pushed back, the quality of a man who had been pacing and had stopped when I knocked.He looked at me.I looked at him.“You heard,” he said.“Marcus didn’t tell me anything,” I said. “He stopped himself.”Something moved through his face.“But enough,” he said.“Enough to kn

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