บททั้งหมดของ The wife I swore I’d never be : บทที่ 91 - บทที่ 98

Donald povCallum came to the house himself the next evening, which he had never done before, always preferring the anonymity of a phone call to the visibility of an actual visit.Donald understood, watching him stand in the study doorway with his cap still in his hands, that whatever he’d found was not something he trusted to a line that could be recorded.“Tell me,” Donald said.“Jade Hanslow wants to meet with your wife. Tomorrow afternoon, a café on the east side, somewhere public. I got close enough to hear part of a call she made arranging it.”Callum’s voice was flat, professional, a man reporting facts rather than offering opinions about them.“She told the person on the other end she was finally going to tell Anita everything. Her exact words. Everything.”The room went very quiet.“Everything,” Donald repeated.“That’s what she said.”Donald sat with the word for a long moment, turning it over the same way he turned over every piece of information that mattered, looking for

Anita pov Donald found me in the kitchen three days after I gave my statement, his face already set into something careful and grave before he’d said a single word, and I understood, watching him come in like that, that whatever he was about to tell me had been rehearsed. “I need to talk to you about something difficult,” he said. “Is it Jade? Have they found her?” “No.” He pulled out the chair across from me and sat, and folded his hands, a gesture he always used when he wanted to appear steady. A man delivering news he’d already made peace with. “It’s my cousin. Distant, on my mother’s side, you’ve never met him. He died two days ago. Sudden. A heart condition no one knew he had.” “Donald, I’m sorry.” “Thank you.” He accepted it briefly, same as he accepted most things, before moving straight to the point. “He had a son. His mother isn’t in the picture, hasn’t been for years, and there’s no one else close enough in the family to take him in. My aunt is too elderly. My cousin

Kelvin pov Marcus came to the flat with a folder again, the same way he’d come with one the day everything about Sorrel had changed, and I understood, watching him set it on the counter without sitting down first, that this one carried a different kind of weight.“I did what you asked,” he said. “Quietly. Nothing that traces back to us.”“Tell me.”“Callum Reyes. Donald’s driver, three years now, previously worked private security for two other families before that. Both references check out clean. Both employers speak well of him.”Marcus opened the folder but didn’t need to look down at it, the way a man recites something he’s already read enough times to have memorised.“Ordinary, by every measure that shows up on paper. But I had someone follow his actual movements for a week, not just the ones on Donald’s schedule, and there’s a pattern that doesn’t fit an ordinary driver’s life.”“What pattern?”“He doesn’t go straight home.“Most nights, fine, he does. Small flat. Nothing unus

DonaldMargaret came without calling, which by now had stopped being unusual and had simply become the register she operated in around him.Donald met her in the hallway with the same practiced steadiness he’d been offering her for weeks, though the steadiness cost him more each time.She stopped in the doorway of the sitting room and did not sit down.There was a small sound from the garden, a boy’s voice, and she turned toward it before Donald could redirect her attention anywhere else.“Who is that?”“My cousin’s son. He passed away recently. I told you about it, I believe, weeks ago.”Donald kept his voice even, unbothered, a fact stated rather than defended.“The boy had nowhere else to go.”Margaret crossed to the window without asking permission and looked down into the garden.Donald watched his mother’s face do something he had spent his entire adult life learning to read on other people and had never once had to read on her, because she had never before looked at him with qu