Semua Bab The wife I swore I’d never be : Bab 111 - Bab 120

Callum pov Donald’s text had come through at six that morning, before Callum had even finished his coffee.Collect Mother’s prescription yourself today. Pharmacy on Deel Street, not the usual one. Text me when it’s done.Callum read it twice, standing at his own kitchen counter in yesterday’s shirt, and felt nothing about it beyond the small, ordinary irritation of an errand added to a day that already had enough in it.He finished his coffee.He kissed his daughter’s head on his way out the door, same as every morning, and she barely stirred, six years old and unbothered by the hour.He drove to the Hargrove house thinking about nothing more complicated than traffic on the bridge.The paper bag sat on the passenger seat like it weighed more than it should.Donald had told him to collect it himself.Not the usual pharmacy, either. A smaller one two boroughs over, the kind with a hand-painted sign and a bell over the door that Callum had ducked his head to clear without thinking.The

Margaret pov The house had gone quiet after his footsteps faded down the stairs.Margaret lay where he’d left her, the pillow damp under her cheek where she hadn’t been able to turn her head away from it, the blanket pulled up crooked from where his hand had smoothed it and stopped halfway. She could feel the crooked edge against her collarbone. She could not fix it.The clock on the far wall ticked.She had counted the ticks before, on other nights, when there was nothing else her mind would agree to hold onto instead. She did not count them tonight. Tonight there was too much else, arriving all at once, faster than the small mechanical sound could keep pace with.Her right hand lay outside the blanket.She looked at it for a long time.She made it move.A knuckle first, then two fingers, the effort of it arriving somewhere behind her eyes as a dull, familiar ache, the same ache that came now with almost everything her body still agreed to do. The fingers curled. Uncurled. It took l

Anita pov Priya set a coffee down in front of me without asking if I wanted it, two cups balanced in one hand, her whole body already saying she wasn’t leaving until I told her something real.“You’ve been strange for weeks,” she said. “Strange even by your standards lately, and your standards have not exactly been calm.”“I’ve had a lot going on.”“You always have a lot going on. This is different.”She sat on the stool across from me and studied my face with the plain, uncomplicated worry I’d forgotten how much I missed.“I’m not going to push. I know there are things you can’t tell me. I just want you to know I noticed, and I’m here anyway.”I felt something in me loosen, just slightly, at being seen without being interrogated.“Thank you,” I said. “I mean that.”“How’s the little boy? Manny.”She said his name carefully, the careful way you say a name you’ve only heard secondhand, wanting to get it right.“You mentioned him once, months ago, and then never again, which for you is

Anita povKelvin was at the studio door within twenty minutes of my second text, which meant he’d already been in the car before I’d finished typing it.“Marcus can’t get anything on what’s in the report,” he said, coming in without waiting to be invited, his coat still on. “Callum handed it over personally this morning and hasn’t said a word about it since. Whatever Donald knows now, we don’t.”“He asked me a strange question this morning,” I said slowly, following him into the small kitchenette Ruth had set up in the back room long before any of this, more for tea between fittings than anything else. “Whether I’d been sleeping well. Whether the studio was keeping me too busy lately. Nothing pointed. But he watched my face the whole time he asked it. He’s been watching everything closely lately.”“That’s not nothing.”“I know.”I sat at the counter and pressed both hands flat against it, steadying something that didn’t want to be steadied.“Kelvin, if that report has real detail in i

DonaldThe glass sat untouched on the table where he'd left it.Just gone eleven. No pause. No glance at her own phone to check. He turned the two words over again, the same way he'd turned them over three times already since she'd gone up.He picked up the glass and drank from it for the first time all evening.Upstairs, a floorboard creaked once and went still.Your mother will have my head.He hadn't planned to say it. It had simply arrived, easy as anything, while he was rebuilding a tower of wooden blocks for the fourth time and Manny was laughing so hard he could barely stand. He set the glass down and looked at it a long moment. A man staring at a word he'd said out loud and couldn't quite take back.He thought of his father, briefly. A man in a small kitchen, telling a boy that the world owed him something and had simply refused to pay it.He finished the glass. He did not pour another.His phone buzzed against the side table.Michael.He let it ring twice before he answered.