All Chapters of The Substitute Bride Of The Blackwood : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

‎POV: Charlotte‎I didn’t tell him.‎I made that decision sitting on the edge of the bed with my hands finally still in my lap, after they’d done what they needed to do, and the decision had the particular quality of something that had been made before I’d consciously arrived at it, the way certain decisions were already made by the time you looked at them properly.‎There were three reasons.‎The first was that the math was mine, not Keller’s. I’d done it in a moving car from memory using numbers I’d been hearing for the first time and assumptions I’d filled in where the data had gaps, and a doctor would look at the same numbers and produce a different calculation, and Damien deserved the doctor’s calculation, not mine.‎The second was that saying it out loud would make it real in a way it wasn’t yet. It was real to me, sitting in this room, in the way things had been calculated and confirmed inside my own head, but saying it to Damien would make it

‎POV: Charlotte‎Eighteen months to two years.‎I carried that number through the days that followed the way you carried something that didn’t have a place to be put down yet, always present, shifting weight between one hand and the other, never gone.‎What surprised me was what the carrying produced.‎Not paralysis. Not the specific grief-stricken stillness I’d half expected in the days after saying the number out loud and watching what it did to him, the way his face had gone when I came back into the library, composed again but with the evidence of what he’d done with those few minutes still visible if you knew what to look for. I’d expected the number to change everything, to make every moment heavy with the awareness of what eighteen months to two years actually meant in terms of ordinary evenings and ordinary mornings and the things neither of us had said yet that we hadn’t run out of time to say.‎Instead it made us deliberate.‎That was th

‎POV: Charlotte ‎Eleanor set her empty cup down and looked at it for a moment. ‎”Is there more tea?” she asked. ‎”Yes,in the kitchen,” I said. ‎She stood without waiting to be led, which was very Eleanor, and I followed her through, and she sat at the small table the way people sat at that table, without ceremony, while I put the kettle on, and Helen appeared briefly and then disappeared again with the discretion of someone who understood when two people needed a room to themselves. ‎That flows naturally from them already being together, uses the kitchen the way the kitchen has been used throughout, and doesn’t require Damien’s exit to prompt anything because he’s already been gon”. ‎”Do you have a minute?” she asked. ‎”Of course,” I said. ‎She came in and sat at the kitchen table, which was unusual. Eleanor typically occupied the more formal rooms of the mansion, the sitting room, the

‎POV: Charlotte‎I couldn’t ignore it.‎‎I tried. I told myself Keller’s reaction was just professional interest, not concern. That a good doctor looked into anything that didn’t match the expected pattern because that was simply part of the job. That when he said he wanted to look into it, he was just being thorough, not hinting at something more. That I was only searching for meaning in his expression because I was scared, and fear had a way of making everything feel important.‎‎I held on to those thoughts for about two days before I gave up and the notebook was coming out of the drawer again.‎‎I spread the entries out on the desk in the small room off the corridor, which had become mine in the quiet way that spaces become yours when you use them consistently enough that no one questions your presence in them, and I looked at the dates again paying close attention.‎I added a new column.‎Who had been at the house in the fort

‎POV: Charlotte‎I put the notebook away on Friday morning and didn’t take it out again.‎That was the decision, and I made it cleanly, without too much deliberation, which was to make them and then keep moving in the direction of having made them rather than standing at the decision looking back.‎The suspicion was embarrassing.‎That was the honest word for it. Embarrassing in the specific way of something that revealed more about the state of your own mind than about the thing you were suspicious of, the kind of thought that a reasonable person examined, found wanting, and set aside before it became something larger than it deserved to be.‎Ethan Mercer had been coming in and out of this house since before I’d arrived in it. He’d been one of the first people I’d met on the night I came home from the wedding as Mrs. Blackwood, warm and efficient in the entrance hall, the kind of person who made you feel immediately that the house knew how to run its