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Lahat ng Kabanata ng Wrong Desires: Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

93 Kabanata

A Strange Request 5

The letter was never meant to be found.I discovered it on a gray afternoon when the fog had come in so thick the cliffs disappeared and the sea only existed as sound. Elias had driven into town for supplies. The house felt larger without him in it, and the silence pressed against my skin until I could not sit still. I went into the study looking for something ordinary — a pen, a book, anything to occupy my hands — and opened the bottom drawer of the desk that had always been my mother’s.The envelope was tucked beneath a stack of old property tax records. Cream stationery. My name written on the front in her sharp, familiar hand. No stamp. No date. Just *Lena*.My fingers shook when I opened it.The letter was not long. It did not need to be.‘If you are reading this, then I am gone and the clause has done its work. Do not be angry with me for the trap. I watched the two of you for years. I saw the way he looked at you when he thought no one noticed. I saw the way you went quiet whene

A Strange Request 6

The fight went out of me in a single, shuddering breath. Elias’s mouth found mine — not gentle, not careful. The kiss tasted like salt and apology and the absolute refusal to let either of us escape. I kissed him back harder, angry, desperate, fingers twisting in his shirt. We stumbled sideways into the study. My mother’s portrait watched from above the fireplace as he backed me against the desk, shoved my coat off my shoulders, and yanked my shirt up.Milk had already soaked through the thin bralette. He made a low, broken sound at the sight of it and tore the fabric aside. His mouth latched onto me with none of the usual restraint. The pull was deep, almost punishing. I cried out and clutched his head, torn between shoving him away and holding him closer. Milk let down in a heavy rush. He swallowed and kept sucking, one hand already working my leggings down my hips.“Elias—”“Quiet.” The word vibrated against my breast. “You don’t get to leave. You don’t get to decide this is over be

A Strange Request 7

The letter stayed on the console table for three days.Neither of us touched it. Neither of us spoke of it again. It simply existed in the house the way the sea existed outside the windows — a constant, wordless fact that no longer required discussion. Something had settled after the night in the study. The frantic edge of guilt had burned itself out, leaving behind a quieter, heavier certainty. We belonged to this place. We belonged to each other. The will had only been the door. What waited on the other side had nothing to do with inheritance law.On the fourth night the fog came in thick and low, swallowing the cliffs and turning the world beyond the glass into soft gray nothing. The house felt sealed, private, as if the rest of the coast had ceased to exist. Elias built a fire in the master bedroom even though the evening was not particularly cold. I stood in the doorway and watched the light move across the walls while he stripped the bed down to the white sheets and turned them

A Wet Nurse 1

Clara’s POVThe house sat at the end of a long gravel drive, half-hidden by dark pines and the low coastal fog that never seemed to lift completely. It was larger than I had expected from the advertisement — pale stone, black shutters, windows that reflected the gray sky like closed eyes. I stood on the front steps with my single suitcase and felt the familiar, useless pressure of milk letting down in my breasts. The timing was cruel. It always was.I rang the bell.Adrian Voss opened the door himself. He was taller than I had imagined from the brief exchange of letters, dark-haired, clean-shaven, dressed in a charcoal sweater that looked expensive and lived-in at the same time. His eyes moved over me once, quickly, assessing. There was no warmth in the look, only a kind of controlled resignation.“Miss Clara Brennen?”“Yes.”“Come in.”The entryway was cool and quiet. A long-case clock ticked somewhere deeper in the house. He did not offer to take my suitcase. He simply turned and wa

A Wet Nurse 2

The days arranged themselves around the baby’s hunger.I learned the sound of his waking cry the way I had once learned the sound of my own child’s — a small, rising note that pulled milk down before I was even fully conscious. I fed him in the nursery chair by the window, the pines outside shifting between fog and weak sunlight. Adrian kept to his word about the schedule. He left trays of food outside my door. He transferred the wages on Friday without comment. He almost never entered the nursery when I was there.Almost.The first time I noticed him watching longer than necessary, I told myself it was concern for the child. The second time, he was already in the doorway when I looked up, one shoulder against the frame, arms crossed. He did not speak. He only watched the baby’s mouth work against my breast until the feeding ended, then nodded once and left. By the fourth day the pattern was established. He would appear near the end of a session, stand in silence, and disappear again

A Wet Nurse 3

The connecting door stayed unlocked.I told myself it was practical. The baby still woke at irregular hours. If the pressure became too much again, it was simpler not to fumble with the latch in the dark. The explanation was thin and I knew it. Every time I passed the door my pulse answered before my mind could invent another reason.Adrian did not mention what had happened. The next morning he left the breakfast tray outside my room as usual. When I carried the child downstairs for a brief airing in the weak sunlight, he nodded from the doorway of his study and said nothing. The silence should have been a relief. Instead it felt like a held breath.That night the engorgement returned earlier.I had fed the baby at nine. By half past eleven both breasts were tight and aching again, milk already seeping into the soft cloth I had pinned inside my nightdress. I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to decide whether to manage it myself. The memory of his mouth — the exact pressure, the lo

A Wet Nurse 4

The new terms settled over the house like a second set of rules no one had written down.I fed the baby first. That part remained inviolable. Whenever his small cry rose through the quiet rooms I went to him, settled into the nursery chair, and let him take what he needed. Only when he was full and sleeping again did the other hunger begin. Sometimes Adrian was already waiting in my room. Sometimes I walked the short distance to his. The connecting door stayed open at all hours. The sound of it no longer startled either of us.He stopped pretending the visits were only about relief.On the third night under the new arrangement he was waiting for me in the low chair near my bed, sleeves rolled, the lamp turned down to a warm circle. The baby had finished only minutes earlier. My breasts were still heavy, the left one already leaking a thin line through the soft cloth I had not bothered to pin carefully. Adrian watched the dampness spread without speaking. When I stopped in front of him

A Wet Nurse 5

The baby’s cry did not stop.It rose and fell, thin and furious, cutting through the walls like something that refused to be ignored. My body answered it automatically — milk letting down hard, soaking the sheet beneath Adrian’s mouth. Every instinct I still possessed told me to push him away, to rise, to go to the child who was not mine but who still needed what I carried. Adrian’s arm remained locked across my waist. He did not lift his head. He simply kept drinking, slow and deliberate, while the cry continued.“Adrian.”He made a low sound against my skin and sucked harder.“He’s hungry.”“He can wait.”The words landed like a slap. I shoved at his shoulder. He allowed himself to be moved only enough to look up at me. Milk shone on his lips and chin. His eyes were darker than I had ever seen them — not the controlled distance of the first days, but something stripped raw and unwilling to yield.“He is your son,” I said, voice shaking.“And you are the only thing in this house that

A Wet Nurse 6

The house was quiet in a way it had never been before.After the fight, after the tears and the milk and the way we had used each other’s bodies like the only honest language left, something settled. The frantic edge was gone. What remained was heavier, quieter, and far more permanent. Adrian did not apologize. I did not ask him to. We simply understood that the line we had been pretending still existed had been erased for good.The baby slept through most of the next day. When he woke I fed him, standing by the nursery window with the pines dark beyond the glass. Adrian watched from the doorway the entire time. He did not interrupt. He did not try to take my attention away. He only waited until the child was full and settled again, then held out his hand.I took it.He led me to the master bedroom — the room that had belonged to his wife, the room he had barely entered since her death. The curtains were drawn against the gray afternoon light. The bed was large and neatly made. He und

The Mapmaker 1

IrisThe house smelled the same.That was the part that undid me most. Not the closed curtains or the thin layer of dust on the banister or the way my mother’s coat still hung by the door like she might walk in at any moment. It was the smell — paper, old wood, the faint metallic trace of ink that had lived in the walls for years. I stood in the front hall with my suitcase and the quiet pressing in from every room, and for a moment I almost turned around and left.Elias was in the study.I knew because the door at the end of the hall was open a few inches and the warm yellow light cut across the floorboards the way it always had. He had barely come out for the funeral. He had stood at the back of the chapel in a dark coat, face unreadable, and left before the last hymn finished. People had murmured the usual things about grief looking different on different men. I had said nothing.I set my suitcase down and walked the length of the hall.The study was exactly as I remembered and comp

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