All Chapters of The Wife He Took For Granted : Chapter 131 - Chapter 135

Dr. Halvorsen's tone shifted somewhere in the middle of the twenty-eight-week appointment, moving from routine to careful in a way Elena noticed before she understood why. Her blood pressure had climbed steadily over the last three visits, and this reading crossed a threshold that clearly concerned her."This is early-stage preeclampsia," Halvorsen said, reviewing the chart. "It's manageable in most cases, especially caught this early. I want you cutting back significantly on work and physical exertion, and I want to see you every two weeks instead of monthly so we can watch the numbers closely. This isn't full bed rest. It's a real reduction, though, not just a token gesture toward taking it easy.""What does 'significantly' mean, practically?" Elena asked, needing something concrete to hold onto."Shorter workdays. No travel for now. Elevated feet in the afternoons, sitting rather than standing through long meetings, and genuinely resting when your body tells you to instead of pushi

The nursery came together gradually over the following weeks, not all at once, but in the unhurried accumulation of small decisions neither of them rushed to finish. Elena chose the curtains after three separate trips to two different stores, finally settling on a pale yellow that Adrian teased her for taking nearly as long to decide on as she'd taken with the guest room's original paint color. The crib, still faintly crooked despite Adrian's careful reading of the instructions, sat beneath the window where the afternoon light fell longest, and Elena found herself standing in the doorway some evenings simply looking at the finished room, still faintly disbelieving that the space they'd left empty for so long finally held its own quiet certainty.Her reduced schedule had settled into something that no longer felt like an interruption, but like its own legitimate way of living. She worked mornings, mostly, reviewing reports and taking calls from a chair in the sunroom rather than her do