Todos los capítulos de Rejected and Pregnant with Alpha Twins: Capítulo 201 - Capítulo 210

~Selene's POV~The monthly governance session runs long, which is not unusual, the agenda always slightly ambitious for the hour allotted to it, but today it runs long for a reason Selene notices before anyone else in the room does, a reason that has nothing to do with the length of the agenda and everything to do with the shape of one particular item on it.Isolde presents the Westmere framework first. She is good at this, precise without being cold, the specific competence that makes her difficult to argue with on the merits, walking the council through the resource-sharing proposal with the fluent ease of someone who has done the underlying work and knows it thoroughly enough to answer any question before it is fully asked. She uses the wall display efficiently, moves through the corridor allocation figures without losing anyone in the room, and closes the presentation with a summary sharp enough that even Rhys, who rarely offers unprompted praise in council sessions, makes a note

~Caden's POV~The evening with Selene is on the calendar the way it has been every Wednesday for the better part of a year, a standing hour after the twins are down, no agenda, nothing that requires either of them to perform anything, simply the two of them in the sitting room with whatever the day has left over between them.He cancels it at six.Isolde calls about the Westmere allocation figures, a discrepancy in the eastern corridor numbers that needs resolving before the morning session, and the call itself takes perhaps four minutes once he actually gets on it, the numbers reconciled cleanly, a transposition error somewhere in the original document, nothing that required urgency at all once he is actually looking at it properly.He tells himself this while he is still on the phone. It could have waited until morning. He knows this even as he is agreeing to review the figures tonight, even as he tells Mrs. Gale to let Selene know he will be a little later than usual, even as the f

~Selene's POV~Miriam tells her on a Thursday morning, over tea, in the voice she uses when she has decided something is not a big deal even though she knows perfectly well that it is, the specific brightness she reserves for news she has been rehearsing how to deliver."The Cultural Council wants to expand the northern liaison role," she says, setting her cup down with more precision than the gesture strictly requires. "Full time, effectively. More travel. I'd be in Silvermere three weeks out of four instead of one."Selene sets her own cup down carefully, matching the deliberateness without quite meaning to. "That's a significant change.""It is." Miriam does not look away from it, does not soften it or rush past it the way she might have done years ago before either of them learned the value of saying true things plainly. "I wanted to tell you before I said yes. Not to ask permission. To tell you, because it will change things here, and I don't want you finding out by simply notici

~Selene's POV~She finds the Westmere summary on her desk on Wednesday morning, tucked beneath the archive correspondence she has been meaning to answer, and she reads it twice before she understands what she is actually looking at.It is a good compromise. She can see that immediately, the same clean logic Caden saw, the seasonal corridor access that solves a problem that has outlasted two years of quarterly agendas without touching anything permanent. She has no substantive objection to a single line of it.What she notices, on the second read, is the signature block.Caden's name is already there, dated Monday. Beneath it, a line for her own signature, and beneath that, in smaller print, a note in Isolde's handwriting: *Summary prepared in lieu of full briefing given Selene's schedule this week — please advise if you'd prefer the working session instead.*She sits with the page for a long moment.The offer of the working session is there, technically, in writing, the specific kind

~Caden's POV~He notices her tiredness before she says anything about it, the specific way she sits down more than she used to, the way she leans against the kitchen counter for a moment before straightening as though correcting a lapse she does not want observed. Tuesday morning it is the stairs, a pause at the landing that lasts perhaps three seconds longer than it should. Wednesday it is Lior's insistence on being carried the full length of the garden, and she carries him anyway, and he watches her set him down afterward with a care that looks less like ordinary parenting fatigue and more like something she is managing deliberately.He does not ask directly, not at first. This is, he understands even as he catches himself doing it, exactly the pattern Selene named in the study three days earlier, the habit of deciding for her rather than asking her, the instinct to simply lighten her schedule without consulting her about whether that is actually what she wants or needs. He nearly d