OWNED AT 18, CLAIMED BY 28 のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 71 - チャプター 80

POV: ThomasThe first thing I noticed was the quiet. Not the bad kind of quiet that meant people were whispering about my heart again, and not the sharp kind that came right before something went wrong. This quiet felt heavier and softer at the same time, like the room itself was trying not to wake me. My wrists stung where the cable ties had been. The side of my head throbbed in a dull, distant way. Somewhere nearby a monitor made a slow, steady sound that matched the feeling in my chest.I opened one eye.The ceiling was the pale hospital kind I already knew too well. The lights were turned down low. A chair sat pulled close to the bed, and in that chair was her. Mum. She was still wearing the same coat she had wrapped around me in the car, though now it hung open over her clothes. Her hand held mine, fingers warm and careful around the sore places on my wrist. She was watching me the way a person watches something they are afraid might disappear if they blink too long.I swallowed

POV: LaurabethMorning light came through the hospital blinds in thin, indifferent stripes. The warmth of the previous night—the solid weight of Vinicio’s arms around both of us, Thomas’s dry voice against his father’s chest, the brief and impossible sense that the three of us had finally landed in the same place—had not survived the sunrise. It remained in memory like heat held in stone after the fire is gone. The room itself had returned to the ordinary business of a hospital at the start of a new day.Thomas was still asleep in the bed. The monitor traced a steady line. His wrists had been cleaned and wrapped. The bruise at his temple looked darker in the daylight but no longer alarmed me the way it had in the car. I sat in the same chair I had occupied through the night, though at some point someone had brought me a thin blanket and a cup of tea that had long since gone cold. My body ached in the deep, delayed way that follows adrenaline. My mind had already begun sorting the next

POV: LaurabethI did not wait for an appointment. The administrative wing of Rossini Holdings was quieter than the hospital, all glass and controlled light and people who stepped out of the way when they saw my face. Vinicio’s office sat at the end of the corridor behind a desk where an assistant started to rise and then thought better of it. I opened the door myself and closed it hard enough to make the sound carry.He was behind the desk in a clean shirt, the dust and blood of the previous night already erased from his appearance. A stack of acquisition papers sat neat at his elbow. He looked up as if he had been expecting the interruption and had only been uncertain of the timing.“You bought the hospital,” I said.“I did.”“You bought it and then issued a directive that I was to keep my privileges regardless of what the board decided about my license.”He leaned back in the chair, entirely unbothered. “That is an accurate summary.”The calm in his voice only sharpened the anger th

POV: LaurabethThe estate gates opened with the same slow mechanical certainty I remembered from another life. The driveway stretched ahead under the late afternoon light, lined with the same trees that had been younger when I last walked this ground as a woman who still believed the future might remain ordinary. I sat in the back of the car with a single bag on the seat beside me and watched the house grow larger through the window. The court order had been precise. I was to reside here for the duration of the supervisory period. The language had been bureaucratic. The reality was that I was returning to the place I had once fled in order to keep our son alive.The car stopped under the portico. I stepped out with the bag and felt the gravel under my shoes like a memory made solid. The front doors of the house were already opening before I reached the top step. Mrs. Felicia stood in the doorway. For a moment she simply stared, both hands pressed to her mouth, the years visible in the

POV: LaurabethI had only meant to go downstairs for a glass of water. The west room was quiet, the photograph still sitting on the nightstand where Thomas had placed it, and the house had settled into the particular stillness that comes after a long day of legal residue and careful conversations. Thomas had gone to find his father after dinner. I had told myself I would give them space. Curiosity, or something less tidy than curiosity, had drawn me toward the main staircase instead.Their voices reached me before I reached the turn in the corridor.I stopped. The sitting room doors were not fully closed. Sound carried cleanly through the gap. I should have turned around. I should have gone back up the stairs and let the conversation remain between father and son. I did not. I stood in the shadowed section of the hallway and listened while Thomas pressed his father for an answer about the photograph and Vinicio tried, with decreasing success, to give him something short of the full tr