Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 1 - Chapitre 10

ROSE 𓆩♡𓆪 Demian’s mother was dying.That was the beginning of everything. That was the fact that it sat on my chest every morning when I woke up and every night when I couldn’t sleep. Mrs. Cole had been in the hospital for three weeks and the doctors had made it very simple fifty thousand dollars for the surgery or she wouldn’t make it to the end of the month.Demian had been working himself to the bone. Ten thousand dollars. That was everything he had managed to pull together. Ten thousand dollars against fifty thousand, and the doctor’s face when he handed it over said everything that needed to be said.I watched him drop to his knees in that corridor.I couldn’t do anything.My boss made the announcement on Tuesday.A client, a Mr. Alex Christopher, had made a specific request. He wanted to spend the night with a virgin. My boss wasn’t subtle about it. He stood in front of all of us and said there was a significant amount of money attached to whoever was willing, and then

ROSE 𓆩♡𓆪For the first time in days, I thought maybe everything would be okay.I had slept my whole life out. By the time I opened my eyes it was past noon, the sun already sliding sideways through the curtain gap. I lay there for a moment and just breathed in and out, no hospital smell underneath it, no decision waiting on the other side of it. Just silence and sunlight and the specific relief of a body that had finally been allowed to rest.I got up, washed my face, pulled on a simple dress.Today was just another day.I almost believed it.Two women were standing by the gate when I stepped outside.They went silent the moment I appeared, not the natural pause of people that was interrupted mid-sentence, but the deliberate, loaded silence of people who were talking about the thing that just walked out the door.One of them glanced at the other.“That’s her,” she murmured.Something cold moved through my chest.I kept walking. Told myself I was reading into it. Got into a cab an

ROSE 𓆩♡𓆪I don’t know how long I walked.Long enough for my feet to register it. Long enough for the evening to finish becoming night and the streets to empty out to the particular sparse population of very late hours a cab rolling past without stopping, a man sitting in a doorway with his eyes fixed on nothing, someone’s music drifting from an upper window and gone before I could name the song.My bag was heavy on my shoulder. My phone was dead. Demian’s words sat in my chest with the specific, settled weight of something that has found exactly the right place to cause damage.“Don’t call me again.”I kept walking.There was nowhere to walk to. I understood that. But walking was doing something the standing still wouldn’t have done keeping my body occupied so my brain could not fully arrive at the reality of my situation all at once. You can only absorb so much if you’re in motion. Standing still lets everything catch up.I walked until my feet made the decision for me.The bridge

ALEX 𓆩♡𓆪I was back in my study when Mrs. Baako knocked.She came upstairs only when something required it. That had been our unspoken arrangement for three years. So when she appeared in my doorway with her hands folded and her expression carefully neutral I set my pen down and waited.“The girl, sir,” she said. “She collapsed at the gate.”I looked at her.“Where is she now?”Mrs. Baako hesitated for exactly one second which from her was the equivalent of a long uncomfortable pause.“Mr. Christopher had her brought inside,” she said. “He is asking for you.”My grandfather was standing at the window of the east sitting room with his hands behind his back when I walked in. He didn’t turn. He looked out at the gate the way he looked at everything, with the patience of a man who had already formed his conclusion and was simply waiting for the room to catch up.Rose was on the sofa. Someone had placed a cushion beneath her head and a blanket over her with careful hands. Her face was pa

I went straight to my study.The hard copy was already there when I arrived, an envelope on my desk that hadn’t been there this morning, Doctor Charles’s report inside it, printed and sealed and waiting. I stood and read it where I found it, and didn't bother sitting down.Pregnant. Approximately two weeks. Consistent with a single encounter.I set it down.Picked up the bottle of vodka from the cabinet and poured myself a measure and stood at the window with it and looked at the garden below and thought about the specific, inconvenient series of decisions that had led to this moment.I thought I was careful enough.Apparently I wasn’t.I took a drink and let the burn settle and thought about the night not what happened, but what I had noticed. The truth of what she was before I touched her. The note I had written without deliberating over it because the truth of it had seemed obvious and worth acknowledging. The fact that I had thought about that note more times in the past twenty