Semua Bab I Regained My Sight Just in Time to See My Husband Cheat: Bab 41 - Bab 49

Elara's POVAlexander told me about the filing that evening, in the study, with the door shut and two drinks poured and neither of us drinking them.He kept his voice level, but I've known him long enough to hear underneath it, and underneath it he was rattled in a way I'd never seen. The trust, frozen. A sealed order, sprung out of nowhere. A lawyer named Blackwood. Accounts locked that he needed unlocked. He laid it out flat and cold, the way he does when he's frightened and doesn't want to show it, and he watched my face the whole time to see how I'd take it.I didn't panic.That's the thing about me that Clara never understood, that Alexander sometimes forgot. I don't fall apart when the ground shifts. I recalculate. Panicking is what you do when you have no next move. I always have a next move."How bad," I asked."Bad. If it holds, the transfers get reversed, the structure comes apart, and there are questions I don't want asked about how any of it was set up in the first place."

"It's paranoia," she agreed, warm now, relieved.But he didn't sound like a man who believed it. He sounded like a man who'd been handed a reason to stop looking and had taken it with both hands because looking any harder frightened him. The doubt was still in his voice, underneath, where her comfort couldn't reach it. She'd talked him down off the ledge. She hadn't talked him back into the house.I knew, standing there, that this wasn't over. A suspicion like that doesn't die because a woman tells it to lie down. It goes quiet. It waits. It watches. He'd said he was right, it was paranoia, and tomorrow or the day after, some small wrong moment would set it off again, and next time perhaps no one would be there to soothe it.I folded my clothes. I gathered the silver, unpolished, and I carried it back to the kitchen quietly, and I stood at the sink for a moment with my hands flat on the cold edge of it, thinking.He was close. Closer than Clara knew, maybe. The woman had bought her so

He asked me to come to his office, and I knew before I reached the door that it was going to be a test. I just didn't know it would be the one that ended everything."I want to talk about the girls' summer," he'd said at breakfast, mild, reasonable. "Come sit with me after. Just us."Just us. In his office, the one room in the house I had the least reason to be in, the room with his desk and his papers and the door that closed all the way. He'd chosen the ground. I understood that walking in. But I couldn't refuse without it looking strange, and looking strange was its own kind of danger now, so I went, hand on the wall, blind and careful, and I let him settle me into the chair across from his desk.I was on my guard. God knows I was on my guard. Three days of tests had taught me to walk into every room like it was rigged, because it was. I sat with my hands folded and my face soft and empty and I braced for whatever small trap he'd laid, a moved object, a dropped sound, a name called

Alexander's POVShe felt her way out of my office with her hand on the wall, blind and careful, perfect, and I sat at my desk and watched her go and thought, coldly, precisely: liar.The glass was still on the desk where I'd gathered it, a little pile of crystal shards catching the light. I looked at it and I saw the thing again, the way I'd see it for a long time, the way she'd flinched. Not toward the sound. Away from the glass. Away from the exact direction of the spray, her body angling from something she could not have known was coming unless she saw it come. And her eyes. Her eyes had dropped and followed the pieces across the floor, tracked them, one clean second, and then torn themselves back up to that careful nothing she'd been wearing for four months.I'd been watching her face. I'd set the whole thing up so I would be watching her face. And I saw it.She can see.There was no doubt left. That was the strange, terrible relief of it, sitting alone in my office with the broke

And this was the thing I hadn't prepared for, standing there. I knew. I was certain. I saw it with my own eyes in that office an hour ago. And she was sitting in front of me denying it so completely, so calmly, with such flawless conviction, that I could feel my own certainty being sanded down at the edges, could feel the doubt trying to creep back in, and I understood, with a kind of cold admiration I hated, that this was a weapon too. Her denial was as practiced as her blindness. She'd deny it to my face until I doubted what I'd seen, because a denial that is perfect makes the accuser feel like the mad one."Stop it," I said. "Stop performing. It's just us. There's no one here to see the show. Drop it.""I don't know what you want me to say." Her voice wavered, just slightly, fear coming into it, a frightened blind woman being loomed over by her husband. "You're standing over me saying I've been lying about being blind. Do you hear how that sounds? Why would I, why would anyone, Ale