Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Wife's Reckoning : Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

Chapter 32 — The Name in the File POV: Elena Voss The name sat in my notebook where I'd written it the night before, underlined twice, like underlining it might make it mean something. I searched it again over coffee. I didn't drink, then again on my lunch break at the hospital, phone angled away from the nurses' station like I was hiding something shameful instead of just desperate. What I found barely counted as anything. An old company registration. A single mention in a property record database, the kind of site that existed to catalogue filings, nobody ever looked at twice. A short business article, three sentences long, naming a development that never went anywhere. Enough to confirm the person was real. Nowhere near enough to tell me who they were to Marcus. I sat back in the break room and let myself remember because the search had shaken something loose. Years ago, before Sophia, before any of it. Marcus, coming home from a meeting, tied already loosened, dropping his

Chapter 34 — The Woman Who Stayed Silent POV: Thelma Lawson I told myself I was going to Elena's house because I wanted to see how she was doing. That was the sentence I practiced in the car, the one I planned to lead with, and even as I said it standing on her porch, I heard how thin it sounded. "I wanted to see how you were doing," I said. Elena looked at me for a long moment before she stepped back to let me in, and I understood from the way she held the door, careful, not quite open, that she wasn't fooled. She had never been easy to fool, not really. I'd just spent a year hoping otherwise. We sat in her kitchen, the same kitchen I used to sit in every week for a decade, and it felt like sitting in a room that no longer recognized me. I asked about Liam. She answered briefly. I asked about the house. She answered that too, polite, distant, giving me exactly enough to keep the silence from becoming unbearable and nothing more. "Why are you really here, Thelma?" she final

Chapter 36 — Before Sophia POV: Elena Voss Carol found me in the break room, coffee in hand, already talking before I'd looked up from my chart. "Did you hear about Marcus's agency? David says one of their biggest investors just pulled out. Completely. No warning." I kept my face still. "I hadn't heard." "Apparently it's a mess over there. David says half the office is in a panic." She waited a beat, like she expected something from me, some flicker of satisfaction, some comment. I gave her none of it. "Thanks for telling me," I said, and went back to my chart, and let the information settle somewhere quiet inside me instead of on my face. I had learned, over the past year, that the things that mattered most were the ones I didn't show right away. My phone rang twenty minutes later. Marcus. I let it ring twice before I answered, not out of hesitation, just because I wasn't going to let him hear me rush. "Elena." His voice was already tight before I'd said a word. "Marcu

Chapter 38 — What He Almost Said POV: Elena Voss He texted that morning, asking to meet, saying it wasn't about reconciliation, wasn't about Liam. He wanted to talk about the truth, he said, nothing else, and something in the plainness of that word made me agree before I'd fully thought it through. I arrived first at the coffee shop, chose a table near the window, ordered something I didn't intend to drink. I wanted to watch him walk in before he had a chance to arrange his face for me. He came in twelve minutes late, and I read everything in the way he moved before he'd even reached the table. Shoulders drawn in. Eyes moving too fast across the room, checking corners, checking the door behind him like he expected someone else to walk through it. A man running out of time, though I couldn't yet say time for what. "Thanks for coming," he said, sitting across from me. "You said it was about the truth." "It is." He wrapped both hands around his coffee without drinking it, th

Chapter 40 — The Package POV: Elena Voss I spent the first part of the week trying to live like a person who wasn't chasing a ghost. I met with an accountant about restructuring the settlement money into something that would actually work for Liam's future, not just sit there as a number I was afraid to touch. I rebuilt his schedule around the new semester, driving him to a Saturday tutoring session he'd been avoiding, standing in the kitchen at six in the morning making sure he actually ate breakfast instead of running out the door with a granola bar in his fist. I went back to full shifts at the hospital, let myself get lost in the rhythm of it, charts and rounds and the particular relief of problems that had clear answers if you looked hard enough. Through all of it, the company sat in the back of my mind like a held breath. I told myself I was setting it aside. I wasn't. I was only pretending to, the way you pretend a bruise doesn't hurt by not pressing on it directly. I calle