All Chapters of The wife I swore I’d never be : Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

99 Chapters

Chapter 62 — What I Couldn’t Say

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

Chapter 63 — The Wrong Thing To Feel

Donald pov The email from Clara Whitfield’s office confirming Sorrel for the pop-up arrived on Friday morning. Donald read it on his phone at his desk before Anita was awake. Then he set the phone face down and sat with it for a moment. Good. He had made three calls to ensure that confirmation came through. Not directly—he never did anything directly—but through the right people. The right pressure applied in the right places. A word here. A favour there. Clara Whitfield believed she had discovered Sorrel herself. She had not. She had been guided toward it the way water is guided. Through channels arranged to look like landscape. Anita needed to be busy. Professionally occupied. Publicly rising. Her attention on the work and not on the gaps. A woman rebuilding her career had less time to reach for the things she couldn’t remember. And a woman whose label was thriving had reasons to stay. Reasons that had nothing to do with a marriage she didn’t f

Chapter 64 — What He Was Building

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

Chapter 65 — The Sentence He Swallowed

Anita pov I heard the voices before I reached the stairs. Donald’s voice calm and controlled And beneath it, another voice. Familiar before I could place it, like rain against a closed window. My father was standing in the hallway. He looked older than the photographs in the house said he should. Thinner. He was holding his coat over one arm as if he wasn’t sure he’d be asked to take it off, and in his other hand was a biscuit tin. Ginger thins. The exact ones. I hadn’t thought about ginger thins in… I didn’t know how long. That was the trouble with everything now. I didn’t know how long about anything. “Anita.” He said my name like a man setting down something breakable. “Dad.” I went to him, and he held me. His arms were careful, too careful, the way you hold a thing you’ve been told you might damage. Over his shoulder I could see Donald watching us with a small, warm, proprietary smile. “I brought…” My father lifted the tin slightly. “You use

Chapter 66 — The mark

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

Chapter 67 — What the Money Was For

Kelvin povDonald Hargrove was waiting outside my building when I got back from the studio.Not lurking. Donald didn’t lurk; lurking was for men who thought they might be wrong to be somewhere. He stood on the pavement with his coat open despite the cold, hands loose at his sides, the posture of a man who had simply decided this was where he would be standing today, and everyone else’s schedule would have to work around it.“Mr. Rae.”He didn’t offer a hand.“Donald.”I stopped a careful distance away. Close enough to be civil. Far enough that whatever came next wouldn’t look like an invitation.“I won’t take much of your time.”He said it pleasantly, the way he apparently said everything, and I understood in that moment, watching him up close for the first time in years, exactly what Anita had been living inside for so long.The pleasantness was the weapon.“I’m told you’ve been useful to my wife. Introductions. A stylist. Coffee, I understand, on a fairly regular schedule.”I said n

Chapter 68— controlling interest

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

Chapter 69 — a driver for safety

Anita pov Donald came home early with flowers. Not lilies. That was the first thing I noticed, standing in the kitchen doorway watching him set them on the counter—white roses, ordinary, the kind of thing you’d buy without thinking too hard about it. He’d never once brought me flowers that weren’t lilies. “You’re early,” I said. “I wanted to be.” He came over and kissed my temple, and his hand stayed at the small of my back a beat longer than usual. “Rough day. I wanted to come home to something good.” “What kind of rough day?” “Business.” He waved it off, easy, and reached past me for a vase. “Nothing worth bringing into this kitchen.” He was warmer than usual all through dinner. He asked about the studio, about Ruth’s hip, about a fabric order I’d mentioned once, weeks ago, and hadn’t expected him to remember. He topped up my water before I’d finished it. He laughed at something I said that wasn’t especially funny. I should have found it lovely. I

Chapter 70 loud

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

Chapter 71— Enough About Me

Anita pov I was going to be different on Thursday. I’d decided it somewhere between Priya’s studio and my own front door—shorter, this time. Professional. I’d get there, say what needed saying about the account, and leave before the hour was properly up. That was the plan. I held onto it the whole drive, knowing that the second I walked through the door, it might slip away. Kelvin was already at the table when I arrived. “You’re early,” he said, getting to his feet. He always stood when I came in. It was such a small thing, but I noticed it every time—the calm, unhurried courtesy of it, as if nothing else needed his attention for those few seconds. “I have somewhere to be after,” I said. Which wasn’t true. “All right.” He didn’t push. He never pushed. That was, I was beginning to understand, part of the problem. We sat. I kept my coat on, which felt like a kind of armor, a visible sign to myself that I wasn’t staying. He noticed—of course he noticed, he no

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