Claimed by my ex husband’s uncle のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

CLARAELENA'S POVClara Blackwood appears at the penthouse on a Wednesday afternoon without calling ahead.She gets past the lobby because Lucien has added her name to the access list, a decision he made without announcing it to me, which I discover only when Mrs. Chen lets me know there is a Mrs. Pemberton in the main room. I have to stop in the hallway and remember that Clara's married name, the one she carries with the particular heaviness of someone who has been wearing an item of clothing that no longer fits for a long time, is Pemberton.She is standing at the window when I come in. She turns, and she has the look of someone who has rehearsed what she intends to say and has now arrived at the moment of saying it and discovered that preparation only accounts for the words, not for the feeling underneath them."Elena," she says. Her voice is unsteady in a way she is clearly aware of and trying to manage. "Thank you for seeing me. I know I should have called.""Sit down," I say. "I

BLOODELENA'S POVVictor Hale calls me directly on a Friday morning.Not Lucien. Not Gerald. Me.I am in the study with the secondary files and the morning's coffee and the particular quality of focused attention that has become, over the past weeks, something I recognize as my own working state not borrowed from anyone else, not performed for an audience. Mine. I look at the name on the phone screen for three seconds before I answer, and in those three seconds I decide two things: I will hear everything he says, and I will record the call.The recording function on the phone connects before I speak. Then I answer."Victor," I say."Elena." His voice is the voice I have been constructing in my imagination since the first time I read his name in my father's files: warm, controlled, the voice of someone who has always believed that charm is the most efficient form of domination. "I appreciate you taking my call.""Tell me what you want."A pause. The pause of someone who expected a dif

THE EGMELENA'S POVThe boardroom is on the thirty-fourth floor of the Blackwood Holdings building, and it has the particular quality of spaces designed to communicate authority before anyone inside them has spoken a word. The table is polished walnut, long enough to seat sixteen, surrounded by chairs in dark leather that have the deliberate weightiness of furniture chosen to make the people sitting in it feel that what they are deciding matters. Floor-to-ceiling windows on the north wall show the city laid out in the flat winter light of a December morning. The flags of the foundation's charitable divisions line the east wall, symmetrical and impeccable.I have been in this room once before, I came to three annual foundation events during my marriage to Adrian, and at each of them I sat near the end of the table and said almost nothing and watched the room perform its version of itself, which is the version where the Blackwood name is above question and everyone present has agreed, i

WHAT REMAINSELENA'S POVSophia calls the DNA result the most novelistic thing that has ever happened to a real person.She says this on a Thursday evening, sitting at the kitchen island with a glass of wine, while I eat leftover pasta and tell her the version of events I have been holding in my body since four in the morning on the day of the EGM. I tell her everything. It takes forty minutes, and she does not interrupt except twice — once to say something under her breath that is not appropriate for any forum, and once to reach across the island and squeeze my hand so hard I feel it in my elbow.When I finish she is quiet for a long time. She looks at the kitchen, at the flowers on the counter, at the second coffee cup on the drying rack, at all the small accumulations of a life being lived in this space. Then she looks at me."Are you all right?" she asks. Not rhetorically, with the specific, focused attention of someone who wants an accurate answer."I think so," I say. "Not compl

VANESSA AGAINELENA'S POVVanessa calls at eight in the morning on a Friday, ten days after the EGM, and her voice is the voice of a woman who has not slept well in some time.I am awake. I have been awake since six, which is becoming my natural rising point now that I have resumed running — different routes, earlier time, Damien's man at a respectful distance and Damien himself reviewing my route each morning before I leave the building. The physical freedom of it has been doing something necessary for me, something that all the clarity and purpose of the past weeks has not been able to fully replace. There is a particular quality to movement in a body that belongs only to you that thinking cannot replicate.I answer the call."I have something," Vanessa says. No greeting. She has always been direct when the social performance layer is stripped away, which I have come to understand is something she and I share, underneath everything else we do not. "Something you need. And I need — I