All Chapters of Married To My Ex-Husband's Uncle: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Xena."Get some sleep Xena."The line went dead.I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment and looked at the wall and thought about the specific quality of Dante Yale's voice at three in the morning when he was trying very hard to sound like a man making a status update.I'd heard care before. Care was what happened when someone had more in their mouth than they were willing to release and spent the whole conversation managing the distance between those two things.I'd grown up in rooms where people were careful around me. Half-sister. Illegitimate. The Cross family had been careful around me my entire life and I knew what it sounded like from every angle.Dante's care was different.His care wasn't about distance. It was about — I didn't have a clean word for it. Something that had been in the car with him. Something that came through in the half second before when he'd said my name and there had been a pause that lasted slightly too long for a man who always knew exactly what he

Xena.Victor called at eight forty-three, leaving me with three wordsHe's asking for you. Then an address I already knew. I'd been awake since the call.I took a car and watched Chicago move past the window and didn't think about anything specific which was something I was getting better at.The house was the kind of house that didn't announce itself. The kind of money that had stopped needing to prove anything several decades ago. A man at the door nodded when I gave my name and stepped aside without a word.Victor met me in the hallway.He looked like a man who had been awake as long as I had except he had made his peace with it earlier. He didn't say anything performative. Just looked at me once and then turned and walked and I followed him down a hallway that had the specific quiet of a house where someone was being careful about noise.He stopped outside a door."The doctor left an hour ago," he said. "Dehydration. Two cracked ribs. Some bruising they're still assessing." He pa

Dante.I stood outside the door for longer than I'd admit to anyone.Victor had told me twice already that Cross was asking after me. Once when the doctor left. Once an hour ago, in the specific way Victor delivered information he thought I should act on without making it sound like an instruction. I'd ignored it both times.I knocked once and went in anyway.Xena was in the chair by the window. Cross was sitting up against the pillows, color better than the night before, the bruising along his jaw gone from black to a dull yellow-green. He looked at me the way men in his condition didn't usually have the strength to look at anyone, like he'd been saving the energy for exactly this."Mr. Yale.""Mr. Cross."Xena didn't say anything. She watched me cross the room, probably deciding later what to do with what she'd seen.I stopped at the foot of the bed."You're the one who got me out," Cross said."I was there.""Your friend Victor told me Yale's boy himself walked into that basement."

Adrian.She came back through the door at four in the afternoon, and I knew before she said a word that something had shifted.Not her face. Her face gave away exactly what she wanted it to and nothing more.I'd learned that about her over two days of watching her perform someone else with a precision that should have scared me more than it had. It was the bag. She'd left with it slung over one shoulder that morning, the posture of someone leaving for good. She came back with it set down by the door like she intended to be here long enough that carrying it around stopped making sense.I was at the desk when she came in."He's settled," she said. "Dante's people are good at this.""I heard." I set the pen down. "You didn't have to tell me that in person.""I know."She crossed the room and sat in the chair across from the desk, the same chair she'd sat in three nights ago when she told me the truth and I'd spent two days deciding what to do with it."I'm staying," she said."Here.""H

Herald.I didn't go to the car right away.The elevator came and went twice while I stood in the lobby of Gerald's building doing nothing that looked like anything from the outside — a man checking his phone, adjusting a cuff, the kind of stillness that passed for ordinary in a building full of people too busy to look twice at anyone not actively in their way.I wasn't checking my phone.I was thinking about the word don't.Don't you dare call me Adrian.I'd said it before I'd decided to say it, which had never happened to me before, not once, not in however many years I'd been doing this. Every word I'd ever spoken as Adrian had gone through a process first — a brief internal check, instinctive by now, fast enough that nobody watching could see it happen. Would the real one say this. Would the real one stand this way, hold this expression, choose this exact phrasing. I'd built an entire self out of that question, asked and answered a thousand times a day until it stopped feeling li