All Chapters of He Chose My Sister, So I Married His Enemy: Chapter 361 - Chapter 370

The restaurant was small and warm and smelled of garlic and wet wool, with steam running down the inside of the front window. A coat stand by the door leaned at an angle that suggested it had given up years ago. Damien hung my coat on it and then his own, and the whole thing tilted toward the wall with a soft groan. He caught it with one hand, took his coat back off, and carried it to our table, where he draped it over the spare chair beside his."Have you been here before?" he asked, when we'd been shown to a square table against the wall. "You crossed that road like you had a reservation.""I've never seen it in my life. I was hungry.""So I've been brought in off the street.""Sort of. Does it help that I looked sure?""It did, a bit."The ink was still on the side of his hand, blurred by the rain into a grey thumbprint. I reached across and rubbed at it, which only spread it further. He watched my thumb for a moment and then looked up."I liked that you asked me to dinner," he sai

The gate stuck for a second and then gave, and the agent led us along the side of the house in single file. There was a strip of gravel, a downpipe wrapped in something green, and a row of terracotta pots someone had left against the wall, which Damien glanced at as if checking their drainage. What I noticed first was the quiet. The brick on both sides shut out the road so completely that I could hear the agent's keys swinging against her coat.The garden opened out long and narrow, walled on three sides, with a worn lawn running down to the far end. The bench was exactly where the photograph had put it, in the last corner, against a wall thick with climbing plants, and it looked as if the weather had never been allowed in. Damien walked down to it without a word. He stood in front of it for a while, looked back up the garden toward the house, and then rested his palm flat on the seat, the way he'd tested the pots at the nursery.He liked it. I could see that from the way he stood, lo

The agent confirmed Sunday at two within the hour, and for once neither of us had to move anything to make it fit. In daylight the house was plainer than its photographs, a brick semi-detached with a dull brown door and a bay window that had never tried to impress anyone, and I understood at once why I'd nearly scrolled past it. Damien was looking at something else, a boot scraper set into the low front wall beside the step, worn smooth in the middle."Someone's used that every day for years," he said."It's a boot scraper, Damien.""It's a very well-used boot scraper." The agent opened the door before I could answer.Inside, the hall was narrow, with a calendar still pinned by the telephone table and a row of hooks that looked as if they had been loved to death. What the photographs had missed was the light. A window above the landing sent daylight down the stairs and across the floor, so that the whole hall seemed warmed from above, and I stopped at the bottom just to stand in it."

We thanked the agent at the gate, said we would be in touch in the morning, and walked back to the car without saying much. Damien drove, and I watched the streets go by with my hand resting on his knee, and neither of us felt the need to fill the quiet. By the time we turned into our own road, it was getting dark and the windows were lit.I took off my shoes in the hall and put them in their place by the stairs, and the house settled around me. The lamp in the sitting room was already on, the armchair by the window held a dent where I had curled up that morning, and I knew exactly which drawer Damien would open next, the one in the kitchen where the matches lived. He opened it, found the matches, and lit the candle on the sill as if the house had asked him to. I sat down in my corner and felt perfectly content.He came back with the newspaper folded to the crossword and handed me the pen. "Do you want to start, or shall I?""I'll start." I did seven across before he'd finished sittin

The keys were in my hand by a quarter past eleven, and we stood on the pavement in front of the brown door with the weight of them between us. Damien was holding the rosemary in its roasting tin in both hands and the overnight bag over one shoulder, which meant he could do nothing but wait while I tried the lock. I turned the key the wrong way, and then the right way too hard, and then the wrong way again."It's a different lock," I said."It's a lock. They're generally the same.""Not this one.""You're doing it the way you do ours.""Then do it yourself," I said, and held out the keys, and he looked down at his hands and laughed. I tried it once more, lifting the door slightly as I turned, and it gave with a click that made us both cheer, quietly, as if someone might be asleep inside.Inside, the hall smelled faintly of toast. Damien set the roasting tin on the floor and straightened up and said, "It smells like someone else's breakfast.""Give it a week.""Do we get to keep the toa