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หน้าหลัก / Romance / The wife I swore I’d never be / บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

บททั้งหมดของ The wife I swore I’d never be : บทที่ 41 - บทที่ 50

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Chapter 42 — What You Would Be Costing

Anita povDonald knocked on the spare room door on the third night.Two soft taps. Unhurried. He had never once been refused entry to a room in his own house and did not expect to be now.I had been at the small desk by the window with the lamp on, working — the coat, the final adjustments before the Tuesday fitting, the things I could do with a pencil in a room with a locked door.I did not open it.“Anita.”Through the wood. Even. Reasonable.“We should talk. Properly. Not in front of my mother.”I looked at the door for a long moment.I could have left it closed. But leaving it closed would only postpone this, and I had learned something in the last weeks about postponing things.So I set down the pencil and I opened the door.He was in shirtsleeves, no tie, a glass of something amber in one hand. He looked, as he always looked, perfectly composed. A difficult few weeks, borne with dignity.“May I come in,” he said.“No.”I stepped out into the hall instead and pulled the door to b
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Chapter 43 — Someone Got There First

Anita pov “You think you were the wife.” Jade’s voice came from the drawing room doorway before I saw her. I had come down for water and she was simply there, in Donald’s house, in a coat still wet at the shoulders, and the sight of her stopped me at the bottom of the stairs. “He let you wear the name,” she said, coming into the hall. “That’s all it ever was. A name. He gave me a house. A son. The real thing, the whole time, while you sat at his table being looked at.” Her chin lifted. “You were the arrangement, Anita. I was the choice.” “What are you doing in this house, Jade?” “Telling you the truth. Someone should, before you walk out of here thinking you mattered to him.” Her mouth twisted. “You never did. Do you know that he told me everything? Every part of it. He used to come to Westhaven and tell me about you like you were a problem at work.” “Jade—” “He told me about that first year.” She said it fast, like she had been saving it, like it was the shar
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Chapter 44 — Eight Months

Anita pov“Tell me how you knew I’d leave tonight.”I said it the moment he opened the door. No greeting. I had walked three blocks in the rain before a taxi found me, and the whole ride across the city I had been assembling the questions, and that was the one that came out first.Kelvin stepped back to let me in. He did not ask what had happened. He looked at my face and seemed to read most of it.“I didn’t know,” he said. “I’ve been ready every night for weeks. In case.”“In case of what.”“In case you needed somewhere to come.”I stood dripping in his entry and did not move further in. I had not come for comfort. I had come for the truth, the whole of it — the thing he had held back on the sofa with his hand stilled on my ankle, the thing in the flat phone call he always took as Marcus.“Jade was at the house,” I said. “She told me things.” My voice did not shake, which surprised me. “And then I went to leave and I thought — Donald will stop me. He’ll call in my father’s debt the w
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Chapter 45 — In My Own Voice

Anita pov“You’re sure about this. Once it’s out, you can’t put it back.”Helen stood over the long table with the showcase running sheet in one hand and the look she got when she was about to argue with me and already knew she would lose.“I’m sure,” I said.“Because there are two ways to do a divorce when you’re the wife people have been writing about. Quiet — let the lawyers handle it, say nothing, let it fade. Or loud.”She set the sheet down.“Loud means you stop being the woman it happened to. You become the woman who decided. But loud also means you make yourself a target, and the man you’d be targeting is not a man who loses gracefully. You know that better than I do.”“I know exactly what he is.”“Then you know what you’re poking.”I did.That was the point.For weeks I had been a caption.The unfaithful one. The sensitive matter being navigated.Donald’s statement had made me the problem and his name had stayed clean, and I had let it, because I had nothing of my own to put
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Chapter 46 — What He Is Owed

The statement went out at four in the afternoon, eight days later, while a model named Bea was still walking the length of a converted warehouse in a structured jacket the room had gone quiet to watch. It was three sentences. A marriage ending. A label called Sorrel, designed and founded by Anita Hargrove, presented today. A request for privacy on the first and attention on the second. By half past four it was everywhere. Not the version the papers had been running for weeks — the wronged husband, the sensitive matter, the wife who stepped out. This was her own voice, and a voice could not be edited into a caption. Designer. Founded. Under my own name. The story turned over in a single afternoon, and the woman who had been a problem to be managed became, in three sentences, a woman who had decided. His name was in it once. Hers was in all of it. And for the first time in the whole of it, Donald’s name did not come out clean. ⸻ Donald pov Donald learned
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Chapter 47 — The Thing She Couldn’t Explain

Anita pov Kelvin came to the fitting. I had not asked him to. Ruth allowed almost no one into the workshop on a fitting day — it threw off the models, she said, having extra eyes — but she had taken one look at him in the doorway and at whatever was on my face when I saw him, and she had pointed at a stool in the corner and told him not to speak and not to move. He did not speak. He did not move. He sat on the stool in the corner of the green-doored workshop while Bea stood on the platform in the structured jacket and Ruth knelt at the hem with pins between her lips, and he watched me work. And here is the thing about him in that corner — he was not watching the way a man watches something he is proud to be near. He was watching the way you watch a person doing the thing they were made for. His eyes followed my hands. When I stepped back to look at the line of the shoulder, he stepped back inside himself with me, I could feel it, the small shared held breath of some
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Chapter 48 — Why That Name

Anita pov “I have tried for years to make him discard you.” Jade was on the studio step when I came down to lock up. No coat this time, no triumph either… thinner than she’d been at the house, paler, like the week since had taken something out of her. She did not move to come in. She just stood there in the dark with the words already coming out of her, as if she’d been rehearsing them on the walk over. “Years,” she said again. “I gave him a child. I gave him a house I wasn’t allowed to show my child. I gave him every quiet, hidden thing he asked for and never once made it difficult, and I told myself that one day he would see it and choose me properly.” Her voice cracked at the edge. “And the whole time, you. You sat at his table doing nothing, being nothing, refusing him half the time, and you took up all the room in his head. Even now. He’s losing everything and the only thing he’s chasing is you.” She laughed, and there was nothing in it. “I have a child for that ma
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Chapter 49… The Name He Carried

AnitaMy father had aged in the months since the company nearly went under.I saw it the moment he opened the door of the small flat he’d moved into… the careful furniture, the single armchair worn at the arm, a man’s whole life folded down to what mattered. He was so glad I’d come. He made tea neither of us would drink and asked about the showcase and listened to the answers like they were the best thing he’d heard in weeks, and I let him have it, all of it, the pride and the questions, because I knew what I was carrying and I knew what it would do to the afternoon once I set it down.I waited until the tea had gone lukewarm between us.“I need you to tell me about a driver,” I said.He went still with the cup halfway to the tray.“Years ago. He worked for the family. He was charged with a theft… something taken from a car. He went to prison for it. He died there.” I kept my eyes on his face. “He had a son. A small boy.”My father had gone still, the cup halfway to the tray. He set i
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Chapter 50 — A Man With Nothing Left To Win

Anita povThe flowers came first.A delivery to the studio, mid-morning, while Helen and I were three days out from the showcase and buried in run sheets. White lilies. The same lilies that stood in the hall of Donald’s house, that he had kept there for the whole of the marriage. No card. There did not need to be a card.Helen looked at them, then at me, and the colour of the morning changed.“He knows where you work,” she said.“He’s known for a while. Kelvin’s man flagged it.”“Then why send these now.”I looked at the lilies and understood the answer before I said it. “Because he wants me to know he knows. That’s the message. The flowers are the message.”I had spent long enough in that house to read him. Donald did not send flowers to apologise or to soften. He sent them the way he did everything… as a placement of a piece on a board. The lilies were not affection. They were a hand resting on my shoulder from across the city. I see you. I know where you are. I am close.I put them
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Chapter 51 — Where Have You Been Hiding

Anita povAn hour before the doors opened, the warehouse was empty and full of light.I stood at the end of the runway in the quiet of it. The chairs were set in their rows and no one was in them yet. The lighting techs had gone for coffee. Helen was somewhere backstage with the models and the steamer and the small controlled panic that lived behind every show, and for a few minutes there was no one out here but me and the space and the three looks waiting in the wings under cloth.I had imagined this room for months. I had drawn it in my head at five in the morning, at the bathroom window, in the back of cars, in the margins of a life that had no room in it for any of this. And now it was real, and it was mostly empty, and the emptiness was the most beautiful part because in an hour it would be full and I would never have it like this again… mine, silent, before anyone had decided anything about it.I thought about the girl who used to sketch from car windows.I let myself think abou
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