Semua Bab I Buried My Fiancé, Married His Brother: Bab 11 - Bab 20

Sebastian "She hated the color blue," I said. It was not where I had intended to start. It wasn't even on the map of the conversation I had spent the last twenty minutes mentally drafting, but it was the first entirely true thing that came to mind. Once it slipped past my mouth, I found I couldn't stop the rest from following. The dam had cracked, and the water was going to find its way out whether I gave it permission or not. "Everyone assumed she loved it, because her eyes were blue, because people build these little stories about you based on five seconds of observation and then expect you to live inside them forever. She actually hated it. Said it made her feel like furniture. Like a painted chair in the corner of someone else’s room." Christabel didn't say anything. She didn't offer a polite, empty nod or try to steer me toward a safer topic. She just watched me, sitting back against the headboard, still holding that piece of paper in her lap with both hands. She held it delic

Christabel Sebastian came home at four in the afternoon, three hours earlier than I'd ever seen him, his jaw was so clenched I wondered who pissed him, his tie already loosened like he'd been pulling at it in the car. "You're scaring me," I said, meeting him in the entryway with Jane already on my hip, because I'd taken his text seriously enough not to let her out of arm's reach all day, not even for her nap, which she'd taken curled against my side on the couch instead of alone in her room. "What happened?" "Security flagged some activity outside the building. Someone is photographing the entrances, more than the usual press interest. It's probably nothing." He didn't sound like he believed it was probably nothing. "I've doubled the detail. Nobody's getting anywhere near either of you." "That's not an explanation, that's a summary." "It's all I have right now." He reached out, hesitant, and brushed a curl off Jane's forehead, and she leaned into the touch without opening her eyes

Christabel I didn't know what to do with what I just heard.Jane has started talking. Jane was still pressed against the window, pointing at snow that had just started drifting past the glass in slow, lazy spirals, completely unaware that the word she'd just used had detonated something in the room behind her. Sebastian hadn't moved either. Neither had I. We just stood there, two adults frozen by a four year old's accident of a sentence, while the world outside kept snowing like nothing had happened at all. "She didn't mean it like that," I said finally, my voice coming out smaller than I meant it to. "I mean, she probably did, but she doesn't understand what it means, not really, she's just—" "Christabel." "I'm not trying to take anything from her. From Elena. I would never want her to think I'm trying to replace—" "Christabel." Sebastian's voice was quiet, but it cut through my spiral cleanly enough to stop it. "You don't have to apologize for a four year old loving you." "I'm

Christabel The Fontaine gala looked exactly like every scene in a movie I used to watch alone with a bowl of cheap pasta, except this time the chandeliers were real crystal and I was wearing a dress that cost more than my father's monthly rent, and nobody handed me a script for how to act like I belonged here. "You look like you're calculating an escape route," Sebastian murmured, his hand warm at the small of my back as we crossed the ballroom floor, both of us performing a version of ease that neither of us actually felt. "I'm calculating how many of these people already know I'm the woman from the tabloids." "All of them. Ignore it. Smile like you're the one who should be pitied for having to be seen with me." That startled a real laugh out of me, quick and surprised, and I caught more than one head turning toward the sound, curious, cataloguing, exactly the way Beatrix had warned me people in this world would. The evening went smoother than I expected for the first hour. Seba

Christabel Sebastian didn't sleep that night either. I found him at dawn still sitting in the same chair I left him at by the window, phone in his hand, staring at nothing, and when I asked if he'd called anyone about the toxicology report, he just shook his head, like the question itself was too heavy to answer out loud. "I'll ask her," I said. "Beatrix. She likes me less than she likes you, which might actually work in our favor. People say strange things when they think they're only trying to intimidate you." "Christabel, this isn't your fight." "Everything in this house became my fight the day I moved things in here." I crouched in front of him, taking both his hands, feeling how cold they'd gone overnight. "Let me try. If she shuts me down completely, we'll think of something else. But right now you look like you haven't breathed properly in twelve hours, and I don't think you're in any state to sit across from that woman without giving away exactly how much this is costing yo