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"Mom," I said. "Mom.""Yes.""There's so much," I said. "There's so much I have to tell you. So much happened. I don't even know where to start.""Then start at the beginning," she said. "Start wherever you want. I'm not going anywhere." She paused, and her hand found my cheek and cupped it. "I believe I've done quite enough going-nowhere for one lifetime."I laughed and cried at the same time and it came out sounding like a broken hiccup."Can you come home?" I said. "Can you…" I wiped my face with the back of my wrist. "Dr. Lora said you'd need to stay for observation. She said weeks. She said they need to run tests.""Weeks," my mother said. "Weeks, and then I want to go home. I want to sleep in my own bed and I want to look out my own window at my roses." Her eyes moved past me to the window. "Are the roses still alive?""They're alive," I said. "Half-wild and stubborn and they didn't die.""That's the rosebushes I planted," she said. "They'll outlive the both of us."I sat beside

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He went down onto the wet stone of my mother's porch and the cold leached in through his trousers and the snow came down on his shoulders and he looked up at me."Vivian," he said."What… what are you doing?” I said, voice shaky. “Get up. It's freezing.""I've been thinking about what to say for weeks and I want to say it. I want to say all of it." He took a breath. "I stood at that window with my back to you because I was afraid. Not of what you told me. Of the fact that it didn't change anything. I heard the worst thing you've ever done and I loved you more than I did before you said it, and that frightened me half to death because it meant I wasn't in control of it. It meant it wasn't a decision I could make and manage. So I turned around and put my back to you and I sent you out of my house in the dark, and I have spent every day since trying to figure out how a man comes back from that."The snow fell."I can't fix it," he said. "That's the first thing. I've sat with it for two m

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“I'm tired of being careful with you. I'm tired of putting on the caution like a coat every time you come near me." I looked at his face. "Yes. For real this time. But I'm telling you now, Ethan Blackwell… if you ever put your back to me again, I'll break the thing on your head."He was very still."I'm going to kiss you," he said, "in about two seconds, and I need you to know it's coming.""You don't need to announce that. If you're going to kiss me then do it already,” I smiled.His hands came up to my face and his mouth was on mine in the cold on my mother's porch with the snow coming down on both of us, and it was not the careful kiss of a man in a hallway outside his study. It was a kiss with two months of silence in it and four years of fear and the full weight of a man who'd been kneeling in the snow. He kissed me until I had to put my hand on his chest to keep from going over, and he broke off and pressed his forehead against mine and breathed."I love you," he said."I love

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I stood in the doorway of my mother's house and looked at him and felt the first stirring of something that was not anger."Vivian," he said."Dad."He stopped at the bottom of the steps. He looked past me, through the open door into the warm cluttered gold of the house, at the yellow kitchen beyond and the piano and the smell of a roast in the oven and the sound of my mother's voice in the next room telling Ethan where to put the good china."Come in,” I said.I want to record what happened that afternoon as it happened, because I have gone over it so many times since and each time I go over it I am a little less angry and a little more tired and a little more inclined to let it be.My mother sat in her chair by the window with the roses, half-wild and stubborn, green with the first of the spring, and made my father sit in the chair across from her. She poured him tea in the good cup. She did not speak for a long time. She sat and looked at him and let the silence do its work, and my

Last Updated : 2026-10-31

All Chapters of Mr Ex, Call me your uncle's wife now.: Chapter 141 - Chapter 144

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