บททั้งหมดของ The wife I swore I’d never be : บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 70

Anita pov I almost didn’t go. I sat with my phone on Thursday morning and typed three different versions of a cancellation, then deleted all of them, which told me something I wasn’t ready to look at directly. So I put the phone down, got dressed, and went. ⸻ He was already there. He stood when I came in and smiled. I sat down and did not pick up the menu. “You’re different today,” he said. “I saw you. At the print works. With Clara Whitfield.” I hadn’t planned to open with it. It had simply been sitting at the front of me for a week, and it went first. His expression changed —not guilt exactly. “I know.” “You didn’t mention her.” “You didn’t ask.” “I’m not asking now either. It’s not my business.” “No.” He held my eyes. “It isn’t.” We sat with that. The café carried on around us, ordinary and indifferent. I looked at the table and reminded myself, for what felt like the hundredth time, that I was a married woman, that this was coffee, and tha

Anita pov Ruth was at the studio at five forty-seven on setup day. I know because I was already there. I watched her come through the door thirteen minutes before she’d said she would. She looked at me standing at the rail with my coffee and said nothing. Which was how Ruth expressed the full range of her feelings about most things. The confirmation had come Friday. Three lines from Clara Whitfield’s office. Setup Tuesday. Show Thursday. Dress code for the designer: professional. No warmth. Nothing that wasn’t strictly necessary. And somehow still the thing that had made me sit at the kitchen table with my coffee going cold and feel something loosen that had been tight since the hospital. ⸻ Helen arrived at seven with run sheets and three problems she’d already solved. “The coat.” “Ready,” Ruth said. “The dress.” “Ready.” “The jacket.” Ruth gave her a look. “Ready,” I said. “All three. We’re ready.” Helen looked at the pieces for a long m

Anita pov I wasn’t looking for anything. I was only trying to wash the day off my skin. Donald was downstairs on a call, his voice a low, even murmur through the floor—the kind of sound that usually meant twenty minutes at least. I got out of the water and reached for the towel. In the wiped stripe of the mirror, as I turned, something caught my eye. Low. Hidden. In a place no dress would ever show and no stranger would ever see. A mark. I stood very still with the towel in my hand and looked at it in the glass. Then down at it directly. My skin was flushed pink from the heat of the bath. It didn’t go away. Small. Dark. Deliberate. Not a scar. Not a birthmark. I knew my own birthmarks. They belonged to the small collection of things about my body I had never had to relearn. This was ink. Fine lines. Precise. A design no larger than a thumbprint. And unfinished. That was the strangest part. Not damaged. Not faded. Incomplete. A fe

Donald pov Donald had his tie done and his position papers ordered forty minutes before the meeting. Today he would finally meet Halloway. Three days since he’d stood outside a building on a cold pavement and told an actor exactly what kind of man he was. He’d thought about that conversation more than once since. A warning delivered, absorbed, understood. One loose thread, tidied. The accumulation had run fourteen months. His people had flagged it early—a private vehicle, structured in layers, buying Hargrove paper in small immaculate parcels while the market punished the stock. Every attempt to pierce the structure had died in a nest of holding entities. Every overture had gone to lawyers and come back as silence. He had taken it for a threat at first. Then the credit facility kept bleeding and the board kept ageing, and the buyer had started to look less like an enemy and more like the only capital left in the room. So he had courted it. Quiet letters. A channel through

Anita pov Priya was already crying when I opened the studio door. Not dramatically. Sitting on the little sofa by the window with a cup of tea gone cold in both hands, mascara halfway down one cheek, and her thumb going round and round the rim of the cup the way it does when a hand needs somewhere to put itself. “Oh, don’t,” I said, and sat beside her, and she laughed, wet and awful, and put her head on my shoulder. “Marcus texted.” Not our Marcus. Hers, since spring. “Three lines. After eight months.” “What did it say?” “That he’d been thinking, and he didn’t think we wanted the same things.” She wiped under her eye with one knuckle. “What things. I wanted Thai food and someone who texted back within the hour. Was that the thing we didn’t agree on?” “Priya.” “I bought him a coat for his birthday. Wool. A good one.” She said it like evidence. “You don’t buy a man a wool coat if you don’t think you’ll still be around to see him wear it.” I got up and made the tea prop