Semua Bab His Loss: My Ex Husband Wants Me Back : Bab 11 - Bab 20

Elara's POV The waiting room had twelve chairs and I had counted them twice. It was the kind of thing you did when you were trying not to think about something — you counted chairs, you read the notice board, you studied the pattern on the floor tiles until you had memorised it completely and could have reproduced it from memory at three in the morning if required. Which, given my recent sleeping patterns, was not outside the realm of possibility. The clinic was quieter today than my first visit. A woman across the room was knitting something yellow, her needles moving with the automatic ease of long habit. A man sat beside her reading a folded newspaper, his knee pressed lightly against hers in the unconscious way of people who have been beside each other for so long that contact has stopped being deliberate. I looked away from them. I had been doing that a lot lately — looking away from couples. Not out of bitterness exactly. More out of self-preservation. There was a particula

Elara's POV I had not been back to that market since the Tuesday I ran into him. That was eleven days ago. Eleven days of taking different routes, buying my clementines from the small shop on the corner instead, telling myself it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with variety. I was a woman who valued variety. I had simply decided to explore other options. I was aware of how convincing that was. The truth was simpler and more inconvenient: I was not ready to run into Cassian Hale again in a public place with no warning and no preparation and nowhere to direct my eyes except straight at him. But my tutoring client had cancelled that morning, which left me with an unexpected free afternoon and a refrigerator that contained one aging clementine, half a block of cheese, and the specific kind of emptiness that only a proper market could fix. And the market on Rue Mouffetard was closer than the alternatives, and I was not, I told myself firmly, pulling on my coat; I was

Cassian's POV I walked for two hours after I left the café. Not toward anything. Not with a destination. Just moving through the city with my hands in my coat pockets and the afternoon settling grey and cold around me, working through what had just happened in the only way I knew how — by putting physical distance between myself and the feeling until I could look at it from far enough away to think clearly. It wasn't working. A girl. She had told me it was a girl and then immediately looked like she hadn't meant to, like the information had slipped out through a gap in her defences before she could catch it. I had seen it happen; the brief unguarded moment, the almost-flinch of someone who had given more than they intended. And then she had recovered and straightened and become Elara again, composed and careful, and I had sat across from her and felt the weight of what I had thrown away settle on me with a completeness I had not yet experienced. A daughter. I had a daughter. T

Elara's POV Adrian's expat dinners had a rhythm to them. They happened in the kind of apartment that existed in a specific stratum of Parisian life — high ceilings, good wine, furniture that was either genuinely antique or very convincingly pretending to be. The guests were always interesting in the way that people who had deliberately chosen to live outside their own countries tended to be: slightly unmoored, very well-read, carrying the particular energy of people who had decided that reinvention was a lifestyle rather than a crisis. I had been to three of them now. Tonight there was a retired journalist from Lyon who had opinions about everything and delivered them with magnificent confidence. A sculptor from Berlin who barely spoke but whose hands were always moving, shaping the air in front of her as though she couldn't stop. Two younger men who worked in something vague involving technology and spent most of the evening talking to each other. And Marguerite — a French litera

Elara's POV He was on the bench again. Same coat. Same newspaper. Same particular arrangement of a man who had absolutely nowhere else to be and wanted me to know it. I walked past him. "Appointment go well?" he called after me. "You're not allowed to ask that." "I'm asking anyway." I stopped. Turned. He had folded the newspaper and was looking at me with that expression — the open one, the one he hadn't had before Paris, the one I was running out of ways to be immune to. "Everything is fine," I said. "She's fine." Something in him released. Just a fraction. Just enough that I caught it and filed it away before I could stop myself from caring. "Good," he said. He stood. "I'll walk you to the metro." "I didn't ask you to." "No." He fell into step beside me. "You didn't." We walked in silence for half a block — the particular silence of two people who have too much to say and have agreed, without discussing it, not to say any of it on a public street in the cold. A woman wi