All Chapters of Married To My Ex-Husband's Uncle: Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

151 Chapters

Chapter 141: Nobody Yet

Xena."You're not coming in until you tell me you've eaten.""Move.""Xena.""Dante, move."He moved.The house in Evanston had a hall I'd been in nine times and had never once liked. Every room in it is arranged so a man can see the door. There were two crates by the stairs with a courier docket taped to the top one, thirty-day close, four per cent under asking.I got my coat off and my phone out and I put it in his hand face up."Look at it," I said.Dante looked.He looked f

Chapter 142: The Specification

Xena."I'm not coming in, Adrian. Come down.""It's raining.""I know what it's doing. Come down."There was a pause on the line long enough for me to hear him find his shoes.Adrian Yale lives in a two-bedroom on Roscoe with a buzzer that hasn't worked since March, and he came out of the door in a jumper with no coat over it, the way a man does when he's decided the conversation will be short.He stopped four feet away on the wet path."You've been crying," he said."I've been in a courtroom.""Those aren't different things any more." He almost smiled. It didn't hold. "Xena, what's happened."I'd rehearsed it in the car for twenty minutes. Every version came out like an accusation, which it wasn't, and every softer version came out like something I'd decided to protect him from, which he'd never once forgiven anybody for.So I gave it to him flat."Your grandfather opened a file on me in March 2019," I said. "He paid my mother twelve thousand dollars to report on me. He had a photogr

Chapter 143: The Third Of November

Xena."Don't get up. I've got a key."Adrian said it into the hall in Evanston at twenty past eight at night, and he said it in a voice I'd never heard him use, and he came past me without taking his coat off.Dante was standing in the study doorway.The notebook was on the desk behind him. He'd left it out. That was the first thing I saw, and it stopped me in the hall, because a man who leaves it out has spent the last four hours deciding something."Adrian—""2008 to 2010." Adrian stopped in the middle of the rug. "That's all I want. You can keep the rest. Burn it, give it to Osei, put it in the sea. I want three years.""Sit down.""I've had two people tell me to sit down today." His hands were shaking. He didn't hide them, which was new. "I'd like somebody to say a true sentence to me standing up."Dante didn't move out of the doorway."Ask me the question you actually came with," he said."Did my mother talk to you."The house made the sound old houses make when the heating's bee

Chapter 144: Give It To Him At Eighteen

Xena."No.""Read it.""No." Dante put the notebook down on the desk and took two steps back from it. "You read it.""You've read the other two.""I know what I've done."Adrian didn't touch it."That's the first thing you've said all night that came out crooked," Adrian noted, and he still didn't move toward the desk.Dante went and stood at the window with his back to the room. The rain had stopped an hour ago. There was nothing out there to look at except a wet street and a car with its lights off."Take the book, Adrian.""Why won't you read it?""Because I've had seventeen years of hearing it in my own voice."That's not the reason.I don't know how I knew. I'd been in that house nine times and I'd learned exactly one thing about the man, which is that when he stops being able to say a sentence properly he is at the part he actually cares about.Adrian picked up the notebook.He found the page himself. He had to go back twice, because the third entry is short, and short entries a

Chapter 145: Recipient Declined

Xena.I got the packing tape off the top of the crate and started pulling it back in one long strip."Xena.""You've got a courier coming Thursday." The tape came away with a noise that filled the whole hall. "You've packed the wrong things. That's the kitchen crate and you've put books in it.""Leave it.""You've labelled it in pencil.""Leave it, Xena."I stopped with about four feet of tape hanging off my hand.It was ten past eleven. Adrian had gone forty minutes ago with two keys in his coat pocket and a registration slip folded into his wallet. He'd refused a lift. I'd stood at the window like an idiot watching him get to the corner."Then say something." Anger came up my throat with nowhere useful to go."I don't have anything.""You had eleven hundred words for him.""That was an account." Dante was still in the study doorway. He hadn't sat down since eight. "I've been rehearsing that one for seventeen years. Ask me something I haven't rehearsed and you'll get what you're gett

Chapter 146: Nothing Said In This Room

Xena."He's coming out. I want you to know he nearly didn't."The officer on the desk said it while she was checking my ID against a screen, without looking up, in the tone of a woman doing me a kindness she'd deny later."He declined the mail item." I heard how thin it came out."He declined the mail item Friday. He put you on the visit sheet Monday." She slid my licence back. "Locker four. No paper, no pens, nothing in your hands."The room at Joliet has eleven tables bolted to the floor and a vending machine that only takes coins from a machine that only takes cash. I got there first. I sat with my hands flat on the table because there was nowhere else to put them.Herald came in with a man's walk and a boy's shoulders.They'd cut his hair since Thursday. He's twenty-four and he looked about nineteen. He sat down across from me. For a second neither of us managed a word."You look tired." Concern got into his voice before he could stop it."You declined my photograph.""Yes.""Hera

Chapter 147: Everyone Who's Ever Known A Whole Thing

Xena."Time," the officer called, from the wall."Herald—""You've got ninety seconds." He leaned in over the table, and for once he wasn't calm about it, and that frightened me more than anything he'd said all afternoon. "Listen to me. Don't go to Osei with this. Not yet.""Why not?""Because I don't know what he told her already, and if you walk in asking about March visits before she's raised it, you'll look like you knew something and sat on it." His hands had come off the table. "You're named in a federal matter, Xena. Everything you do from today gets read by somebody looking for a reason.""Then tell me what he said.""Wrap it up, Cross." The officer was already moving."He asked me who I'd protect," Herald said, fast, low, the words falling over each other for the first time since I'd sat down. "First visit, he asked me who I'd protect if it came to it. Second visit, he told me why he was asking.""Herald—""Sunday. Same time. Bring nothing." A guard had a hand near his shoulde

Chapter 148: Fear Wearing A Better Coat

Xena."You're back.""You're still up."Dante was at the kitchen table in the house on Wells — my flat, not his, because I'd driven there without deciding to and only noticed when I was already parking. He had his coat still on. There was a mug in front of him he hadn't touched."How did it go with Osei," I got out, before I'd even taken my coat off."Sit down first.""Dante.""I'm not being dramatic. You've been driving for an hour and you look like you haven't eaten." He got up and put the kettle on without asking, a thing he does now, and which I have stopped minding. "Sit down, and then I'll tell you, and then you can be angry at whichever part of it you like."I sat down."She took it," Dante said, relief and dread tangled up in the same breath. "Nine fifteen this morning. I sat in the corridor from nine, like I said I would. Her clerk let me in at quarter past. I put the notebook on her desk and told her what it was before she'd opened it.""And?""She read the Eleanor pages fir

Chapter 149: Deciding Out Loud

Xena. Cassandra Byrne answered her own door in a cardigan the colour of weak tea, and she looked at me for a long moment before she said anything at all. "You've got your father's mouth," she observed, not unkindly, as though noting the weather. "I keep meaning to tell you that and then deciding it isn't mine to give you." "You can give it to me now." "I can." She stood back to let me in. "Come through. I've made too much coffee for one person, which is a lie old women tell so nobody feels they're intruding." Her flat in Streeterville has almost nothing in it. A chair. A second chair that looked unused. A window with a view of the river that she wasn't looking out of. I sat in the used chair. "You know why I've come." I didn't bother with an opening. "I know you've come about Sunday." Cassandra poured without asking w

Chapter 150: Who I'd Protect

Xena. "You brought her." Herald stopped three feet from the table, and for the first time since I'd known him, something that wasn't calm got all the way to his face before he could stop it. "Sit down," Cassandra said, in the voice she must have used on grown men for sixty years. "I'm too old to have a conversation looking up at somebody." He sat. "You've been writing to me about the weather," he said to her. "And now you're here." "Paper wasn't doing either of us any good." She folded her hands on the table, steady as stone. "Victor Hale. March. Twice. I'd like to know what he said." "She already knows some of it," I offered, wanting to spare him the worst of the telling. "I told her about the question." Herald looked at me. "You told her." "I told her he asked who you'd prot

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