All Chapters of Mr Ex, Call me your uncle's wife now.: Chapter 131 - Chapter 140

I didn't sleep. I lay there with a blanket pulled up to my chin and my eyes on the ceiling and I listened to the city outside the window and the refrigerator humming in the kitchen and Sophie's footsteps in her bedroom above me. I thought about Ethan standing at the window with his back to me. I thought about the way his voice had cracked. I thought about the words, the way he'd closed his eyes when he heard them, like they'd hurt him, like they'd been the worst thing I could have said.I thought about Sandra in her orange jumpsuit with her flat hair and her sharp eyes and her smile. I thought about the deal. I thought about the paperwork sitting in a file somewhere, waiting for Denise Kwan's hands.And I thought about the baby.That was the thing I kept coming back to. Not the man. Not the clinic. The baby. The baby I'd never let myself think about. The baby I'd buried under years of work and ambition and forward motion. The baby who would have been years old by now. The baby who wo

Marcus called me at six in the morning on the seventh day.He didn't say hello. He said, "I need you to come to my office. Now. Don't talk to anyone on the way. Don't answer your phone unless it's me."I was at Sophie's. I'd been sleeping on her couch for a week. I got up and pulled on jeans and a sweater and my coat and I didn't wake Sophie because I didn't know what to tell her. I drove downtown in the gray morning with my hands tight on the wheel and my heart going too fast and I didn't turn on the radio.Marcus was waiting for me in the lobby of his building. He was holding a manila folder and his face was set in a way I hadn't seen before. Not angry. Not tired. Something else. Something careful."What's going on?" I said."Not here." He put a hand on my elbow and steered me toward the elevator. "Let's go upstairs."His office was on the eleventh floor and the blinds were drawn and there was a second folder on his desk. He sat down behind it and gestured for me to sit and I sat d

And I thought about the fact that he'd confessed. He could have lied. He could have kept his secret. He could have let the police chase Sandra and Megan and never said a word about himself. But he hadn't. He'd told the truth. He'd told the truth even though it meant he was going to lose everything."Why did you confess?" I said.He looked at me."I told you," he said. "Because I couldn't do it anymore.""That's not what I mean." I looked at him. "You could have kept your secret. You could have let the police chase Sandra and Megan and never said a word about yourself. You could have kept your job and your life and your freedom. Why didn't you?"He looked at me for a long moment."Because you deserved to know the truth," he said. "Because you've spent your whole life being lied to by people who were supposed to love you. Your father lied to you. Sandra lied to you. Megan lied to you. And I.. " He stopped. "And I lied to you too. I lied to you and I lied to you and I lied to you and I c

Marcus called me on a Tuesday afternoon, two days after the sentencing, and asked me to come to his office. He didn't say why. He didn't have to. I knew what it was. I'd known it was coming since the day the judge had brought down the gavel.I drove downtown in the afternoon light with the windows down and the radio on low and I didn't feel the way I thought I would feel. I thought I'd feel triumphant. I thought I'd feel vindicated. I thought I'd feel like a woman who'd won a war. Instead I felt like a woman who'd walked off a battlefield and was standing in the quiet afterward, listening to the ringing in her own ears.Marcus was waiting for me in the lobby. He shook my hand and led me upstairs and sat me down in the chair across from his desk and poured me a glass of water I didn't drink."It's done," he said. "The trust has been fully restored. The house is yours. The accounts are yours. The estate is yours. Everything Sandra took has been returned, recovered and paid back throug

But I didn't close the browser either. I left the tab open and I went to bed and I lay there in the dark and I thought about Lisbon and I thought about disappearing and I thought about what it would feel like to be a woman with no history.And then I thought about Ethan again until I fell asleep with his name on my lips.The distance between us grew.It grew the way distance grows… slowly, then all at once. It grew in the days I didn't call him and the nights I didn't hear from him. It grew in the silence that stretched between us like a wire pulled tight. It grew in the way I stopped checking my phone and the way he stopped picking up his.I moved back into my mother's house in early December.Sophie helped me. She came with me on a Saturday morning with boxes and cleaning supplies and a bottle of wine and we spent the day opening windows and pulling sheets off furniture and scrubbing floors. We aired out the rooms and dusted the shelves and washed the windows until the light came t