All Chapters of HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

BELLA’S POVHe came downstairs at five fifty-eight.I was at the kitchen counter with the coffee I had made at five forty-six and had been holding for twelve minutes, the cup long past warm, and he came through the kitchen door and stopped when he saw me already there, already dressed, already waiting.He looked at me.I looked at him.The early morning version of him, the version I knew from the run, except this was not the run version — this was the city version, the suit, the dark coat, the assembled version at six in the morning which should have looked like an effort and did not. He had the quality of a man who had not slept and had dressed in the dark and had arrived in the kitchen carrying something heavy and was managing the weight of it with the specific discipline of long practice.He looked at the coffee in my hand.He looked at my face.He said nothing about the fact that I had clearly not slept. I said nothing about the fact that he clearly had not slept. We were very goo

BELLA’S POVHe didn’t move his hand.I want to be precise about this because it mattered — he said you know this person and I said his name was Daniel and he did not move his hand. The hand stayed over mine on my thigh in the pulled-over car on the city road with the grey morning outside and the engine still running and everything that had just been said sitting in the air of the car with nowhere to go.I looked at his hand.The warmth of it.The specific weight of it.Eight weeks of this house and not once, not the doorway and not the window seat and not the kitchen at midnight, and now his hand over mine on the side of a city road at six-thirty in the morning because my father might have been murdered and my ex-boyfriend might have been the one who did it.This was not the context in which I had imagined the first touch.I thought this and then I thought: of course it is. Of course this is the context. This house had never done anything the ordinary way.“Daniel,” he said. “Last nam

BELLA’S POVThe storage unit was in Canary Wharf.My mother had chosen it with the specific practical logic she brought to all decisions made in crisis — close to the solicitor’s office, reasonable monthly rate, ground floor access so she hadn’t needed to carry the boxes up stairs in the weeks after my father died when her arms had been doing all the carrying her body could manage and her grief had been doing the rest.I had been here twice.Once to help bring the boxes in, three weeks after the funeral, the specific terrible practicality of that day. Once six months later to retrieve a document for the probate. Both times I had moved through the unit with the efficiency of someone who needed to get in and out without staying long enough to feel the full weight of what the boxes contained.This was the third time.Dominic was beside me at the roll-up door with the key code I had remembered from two years ago, the specific combination my mother had told me and I had stored without know

BELLA’S POVMy mother had made breakfast.Not Petra — her. This was the specific domestic expression of my mother’s happiness, the cooking, the occasional Saturday morning when she decided the kitchen was hers and produced something from it with the easy confidence of a woman who had cooked well her whole life and knew it.Eggs. Toast. The good coffee. The table set with the Saturday morning quality, the fuller setting, the weekend care.She turned when I came in.“There you are,” she said. The warm version, the uncomplicated version, my mother in her kitchen on a Saturday morning with the good coffee and the eggs and no knowledge of what was under my coat.“Sorry,” I said. “Early errand.”“Dominic said.” She was already plating. “Sit down. You look cold.”I sat down.I was cold. The October morning had been the October morning and the storage unit had been the storage unit and the car had been the car and I was cold in the specific way of someone whose body had been doing something s

BELLA’S POVI read the messages at five o’clock.Not because I was ready. Because the not-reading had become its own problem, the specific anxiety of an unread thing sitting in your pocket growing heavier with each hour of not-looking. I went to the upstairs bathroom, the one off the corridor, the one nobody used in the afternoons, and I locked the door and I sat on the edge of the bath and I read them.Third message, sent at eleven forty-seven.Bella I’m serious. I know this is out of nowhere but I need to talk to you. Not over text. In person. It’s about something important.Fourth message, sent at two-fifteen.I know you’ve seen these. Please.I read them twice.The quality of them.I had been right in the fourteenth floor room — there was fear in them. The specific texture of a person sending messages they would not have sent if they had any other option. The please at the end of the fourth one, which was not a Daniel Carr word. He had never said please in a message in eighteen mo