All Chapters of Married To My Ex-Husband's Uncle: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

Xena."Say it again.""Dante, I need you to actually hear me before you—""Say it again." He hadn't moved from the doorway of his own kitchen. "The word. Just the word.""Guardianship."Something went out of his face. Not colour — colour had gone already, in the car, the second I'd started talking. This was something under the colour."When." His voice had dropped almost to nothing."Herald didn't give me a date. He said Victor told him you were helping build the paperwork. Somebody inside the family. Somebody who'd sign off on it and never lose a night's sleep." I made myself keep going, because if I stopped now I don't think I'd have started again. "That's what he said.""I didn't—" Dante stopped himself. Started again. "I need to think.""Take your time.""No. Actual time. Not the kind where I say something clever in four seconds because I can't stand the silence." He put both hands flat on the counter and stood there like a man bracing for weather. "Give me a minute, Xena. A real

Xena. "You can't come in." "I know I can't come in." "I'm just saying it so we're both clear." Dante had his tie already loosened before we'd even parked. "Counsel only. You'll be in the lobby." "I've been in worse lobbies this month." He almost smiled at that. It didn't last. "If they call you back—" "They won't call me back. It's not that kind of visit." "I know. I just wanted to say it in case." He touched my arm, brief, and then he was gone through the first set of doors. I watched him go through the second set of doors with a legal pad under his arm and nothing else. No phone. No bag. The lobby had a television bolted high in one corner, muted, running a cooking competition nobody in the room was watching. A woman two chairs down fed coins into a machine that only g

Xena."Her potassium is dangerously low," the doctor said. "That's what caused the arrhythmia. Not her heart itself — her heart's fine. It's what's around it that isn't.""Low potassium," Hannah repeated, like the words didn't fit together right."Combined with dehydration and what looks like weeks of skipped meals, it was enough to throw her rhythm off badly." The doctor looked at Diana, not unkindly. "You're lucky the neighbour found you when she did.""I keep hearing that," Diana murmured, something wry surfacing despite everything. "Lucky.""You are. I'd like you to hear it as a fact, not an insult." The doctor made a note. "We'll get your levels stable overnight. You'll need to eat properly, sleep properly, and stop treating your own body like evidence in a case you're building against yourself."Diana almost laughed at that. It came out thin."I'll try," she promised, and for once it didn't sound like a deflection."Try harder than that." The doctor almost smiled. "I'll be back

Xena."He said yes.""Dante—""He said yes, but he has conditions, and I need you to hear them before you get too relieved." Dante's voice had the particular speed of a man who'd been awake too long and had too little time left to waste on pacing himself. "He won't let me write it. He won't let Okafor write it. He wants to write it himself, longhand, in his own words, and he wants it entered exactly as he writes it. No editing. No legal smoothing."I looked back through the glass at my mother, asleep now, Hannah's head tipped against the chair beside her."That's not unreasonable," I said, though my stomach had already started sinking with the arithmetic. A statement that has to be written by hand, checked, faxed, and filed before six in the morning is a different thing from a statement that simply exists."It's not unreasonable. It's also a logistical nightmare at eleven at night in a maximum security facility with a deadline of six." Something in Dante's voice cracked, just slightly

Xena."You didn't have to come.""I know I didn't."Adrian stood back to let me into the flat on Roscoe, the buzzer still broken, the hallway still smelling faintly of somebody else's cooking. He'd changed out of the jumper from the wet path into something equally unremarkable, and his eyes were red-rimmed in the particular way that told me he'd been crying alone, which is a different thing from being caught at it."I brought nothing," I said, holding my empty hands up as proof. "No folder. No revelation. I just didn't want to leave it on a phone call.""That's something, I suppose." He gestured me toward the sofa and didn't sit down himself, choosing instead to stand by the window with his arms folded, the same defensive geometry he'd had on the porch weeks ago. "I've had a few hours to think since I hung up on you.""You didn't hang up on me.""I might as well have." He looked out at the street. "I said my piece and then I stopped talking, which is its own kind of hanging up, if you