บททั้งหมดของ The wife I swore I’d never be : บทที่ 31 - บทที่ 40

ANITA POV We stood there for maybe three minutes. The rain. The umbrella. The cameras across the road still shooting. Neither of us speaking. Inside the restaurant the anniversary dinner was still going on. I could hear it faintly through the glass — Margaret’s voice, a laugh from the table, cutlery. I couldn’t stop seeing the boy’s face. Donald’s jaw, only smaller, his head tipped back as he stared at the ceiling lights with absolute delight. I’d looked at him for only a second, but it had been enough. Before I’d finished taking him in, something inside me had already decided what I didn’t want to believe. After that, everything felt slightly out of place. I couldn’t make myself stop thinking about it. My mind kept drifting back to that night Donald came home drunk and did whatever he wanted with me. I’d spent so long trying not to think about it that the memories had dulled around the edges, but now they were sharp again. I still remembered how I’d gone still whenever his han

ANITA POVThree days.I had not gone back.I told myself it was because of the media story — because walking back into that house while my name was in every caption felt like conceding something I could not name but could not afford to give. That was part of it.The other part was simpler.I had stood in the rain on a pavement outside Aurelius and said no for the first time in four years and I was not ready to go back to the house where yes had lived so long it had worn grooves in the floor.I was wearing Helen’s clothes.I had washed the navy dress in the studio sink and hung it on the back of the door and not touched it since.Helen had not asked me to leave.She had not asked me anything.She had given me the daybed and the back room and the studio keys and said stay as long as you need.I had stayed.I worked on the coat in the mornings and the dress in the evenings and slept badly and woke early and worked again.The studio was becoming something I recognised — the productive dis

ANITA POV I woke before he did. His arm was across my waist. The window was one I did not recognise, the light coming through it pale and gold, and his breathing was slow and even against the back of my neck. For a few seconds I did not remember where I was, and it did not frighten me. For a moment—one long moment before the world came back—I just lay there. Warm. Still. Inside my own body and not wishing to be anywhere else. I could not remember the last morning that had started like this. No alarm to perform to. No dress laid out. No face to put on before my feet touched the floor. Then it came back. All of it. The marriage. The photographs. The name in every caption. The showcase in six weeks. The man whose arm was across my waist. I did not move. I had expected to feel something this morning that did not arrive. Guilt, maybe. The cold settling weight of a line crossed. I waited for it. It did not come. What came instead was quieter and strang

Anita povThe sample maker’s workshop was two streets from Mr Cheng’s warehouse.A narrow building with a green door and a buzzer that did not work, so Helen knocked instead — three sharp raps and then a fourth, which I would learn was a code.The woman who opened it was perhaps sixty, small, with reading glasses pushed up into grey hair and a tape measure around her neck like a scarf she had forgotten she was wearing.Her name was Ruth.She did not waste words.She looked at me for a moment over the top of nothing, the way people who work with their hands look at people they are deciding whether to trust, and then she stepped back and let us in.The workshop smelled of fabric and machine oil.A long cutting table.Two industrial machines under a window.Bolts of cloth stacked along one wall and, pinned to a board above the table, the working sketches I had sent through Helen a week ago — the coat and the dress, my drawings, in someone else’s space, studied and marked with small notes

Anita pov He cooked. I had not expected that. I had half expected the morning after to calcify into something formal and awkward — that we would not know how to be in a room together with our clothes on and the lights up. Instead, I came to his flat on the fifth evening, and the smell of garlic and something braising met me at the door. Kelvin stood at the stove in a worn shirt, a tea towel slung over his shoulder. He looked up at me as though I’d been coming home to this kitchen for years. “You’re early,” he said. “You’re domestic.” “I contain multitudes.” He turned back to the pan. “Sit. It’s twenty minutes. There’s wine open if you want it, and water if you don’t, and I have learned not to assume which.” I sat at the small table by the window and watched him cook. It was the most ordinary thing in the world and I could not stop looking at it. A man at a stove. The small competent movements of someone who knew his way around a kitchen. The steam. The radio low. T