All Chapters of The wife I swore I’d never be : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Anita pov Clara’s assistant called the studio on a Monday and asked, without preamble, whether Anita Hargrove could come to the showroom Wednesday at eleven. I went with Helen, because Helen went everywhere Sorrel-related now, quietly, without being asked, the way she’d been doing since the accident. The showroom was three floors of glass and pale wood in a part of the city I still hadn’t learned my way around, and Clara met us at the lift herself, which Helen noted with a small lift of her eyebrows I pretended not to see. “Thank you for coming,” Clara said, and led us through to a room with a long table and a single garment rail, empty, waiting. “You wanted to see us,” I said. “I wanted to make you an offer.” Clara sat, folded her hands, and got straight to it in the way I was beginning to understand was simply how she operated—no warm-up, no small talk spent softening a thing before it landed. “I run buyer relationships for four major stockists. Real ones. The kind that woul

Kelvin pov“I made an offer to that designer today,” Clara said, already pulling her coat off in the doorway before I’d fully got the door open. “Sorrel. The one from the pop-up.”“The one you called the hand,” I said, because I remembered every word Clara had ever said about Anita, and hated myself a little for how easily it came back.“The one with the hand, yes.” She hung the coat slowly, the way she did everything, a woman who had never once needed to rush toward anything. “Four stockists. Real exclusivity. It’s a good offer. I don’t often make offers I’d take myself, and I made her one.”“That’s generous.”“It’s good business.” She said it the way she said most compliments to herself, flat. “Her business partner caught the trap in it inside about ninety seconds, which I respected. Most people take a week to notice what she noticed standing in my own showroom.”I kept my face very still and asked the question I had no right to be this interested in the answer to.“And the designer

Anita pov“How was Priya?”Donald asked it from the sitting room the moment I closed the front door, not even looking up from whatever was on his tablet.I stood in the hallway with my coat still on and my whole mouth still faintly, impossibly aware of another man’s mouth having been on it an hour before.“Fine,” I said. “Sad. Marcus texted her again. She’s decided he’s an idiot, which he is, so that’s progress.”“Good.”He glanced up then, briefly, and I made myself hold his eyes.Steady.A door braced against wind.“You look tired.”“Long night.”“Sit with me. I’ll pour you something.”I sat.He poured.I took the glass and did not drink from it right away because my hand was not entirely steady, and I did not trust it to lift the glass without announcing that fact to the whole room.“How’s the Whitfield contract?” he said, settling back, his attention arranged toward me the careful, complete way it had been for weeks now. “Has Helen finished the review?”“Nearly. She wants another

Kelvin povClara noticed before I’d taken my coat off.“You’re different tonight.”She said it from the sofa, not looking up from whatever was on her phone, in the flat, unbothered tone she used for most observations that weren’t actually flat or unbothered at all.“Long night,” I said.It was true.And I understood, the moment it left my mouth, that it was the exact sentence Anita had used on her own husband a few hours earlier, though I had no way of knowing that yet.“You keep saying that. Long night. Long day. You’ve had a great many long stretches of time lately, Kelvin.”She set the phone down and looked at me directly.Something in her face had gone careful in a way I recognised and did not like recognising.“I’ve been keeping track, you know. Not on purpose. It just… accumulates. A withdrawal here. A silence there. A face that isn’t quite the face you brought into the room five minutes earlier.”“Clara.”“I’m not finishing an argument. I’m stating a fact.”She stood, unfolding

Donald pov Margaret arrived without calling, which by now Donald understood was itself a kind of warning.He met her in the hallway, same as always.She did not remove her coat, which told him this would be short.She did not sit, which told him it would not be gentle.“I said I would come back a third time,” she said.“I said I wouldn’t leave so easily.I meant it.”“Mother—”“Don’t.”She held up a hand, and Donald, who had not been told to stop speaking by anyone in longer than he could comfortably remember, found himself stopping.“I have spent weeks watching you be careful with me.Careful answers.Careful pauses before the careful answers.I raised you, Donald.I know precisely what your care looks like when it’s covering for something, because I have watched you use it on business partners for twenty years, and I recognise the technique.”“I don’t know what you want me to say.”“I want you to say something true.For once.To me, if to no one else.”Her voice had none of the war