Semua Bab She Left With Nothing and Built Everything: Bab 1 - Bab 10

POV: Roza"You burned it again."That was the first thing Callum ever said to me in the kitchen. Three months into our marriage, a Sunday morning, eggs on the stove, his mother's recipe that I had written out by hand and practiced twice. He said it without looking up from his phone. He poured his coffee, picked up his briefcase, and walked back out, and I stood there with the smoke curling around me and that single sentence sitting in my chest like a stone I did not yet know I would carry for seven years.I should have understood him then. I should have read that moment for exactly what it was. But I was twenty-three and newly married and desperately in love with a man who looked at me like a problem he had agreed to manage, and I told myself it would get better. That he would soften. That somewhere beneath the grey eyes and the expensive suits and the silences that filled our house like weather, there was a man who would one day choose me.Seven years. That was how long it took me to

POV: RozaI did not sleep.I sat on the floor of the guest bathroom with my knees pulled up and the pregnancy test in my lap and I watched the night move through the frosted window, black to dark blue to the flat, exhausted grey of a London morning that did not care what had happened in this house. The boiler clicked. A fox barked somewhere on the street below. The house was quiet in the specific way it always was when Callum was in it, every sound careful, every silence loaded.At some point I heard his footsteps on the landing. Then the master bedroom door closing. Then nothing.I thought about my mother.She had married a man who did not love her when she was twenty-two and spent the next thirty years being grateful he stayed. She used to say, "You earn your place, Rosalind. A woman always has to earn her place." She had said it like wisdom. Like something she was giving me. I had believed her so completely that I had spent seven years in a house that was not mine, in a marriage th

POV: RozaEdinburgh did not feel like running away. It felt like breathing for the first time in years. The cold here was sharper than London, but it felt honest. My new room was small. The boiler knocked at night. A bakery below opened at half past five and filled the street with the smell of bread before sunrise. A tabby cat sat on the windowsill across the street every morning, watching the world like it had nowhere else to be.I did not miss my old life, Not for one second.I was ten weeks pregnant. My body was already changing in small, secret ways. Tiredness hit me in waves. Certain smells turned my stomach without warning. And under all of it sat something I had not let myself feel in years. Hope. Small and careful, the kind you protect with both hands.I found a bookshop by accident, looking for somewhere warm to sit. It sat between a dry cleaner and a chip shop, easy to walk past if you were not looking. The owner was an old man named Douglas. He wore the same burgundy jumper

Soren pov I locked the shop later than I meant to. Douglas had left the till in a mess again, receipts stuffed into the drawer instead of filed the way he always forgot to do on Tuesdays, and I stayed behind sorting them because it gave my hands something to do that was not thinking about Roza.It did not work.I kept seeing her face in the doorway of the shop, the careful way she had answered my question without answering it at all. I was just leaving somewhere that stopped being good for me. I had heard that kind of sentence before, from people who had learned to speak in careful shapes because the truth cost too much to say plainly. I knew that shape because I had built my own version of it, years ago, and worn it like a second skin ever since.My phone rang as I was pulling the shutter down.“Isla.”“You sound out of breath,” my sister said. “Please tell me you are not still at that shop at this hour doing Douglas’s filing for him.”“Someone has to.”“That someone does not have t

Gemma pov I waited until morning to say anything. I told myself it was because I was tired, because shouting at half past two would not have changed anything, because I needed to think. The truth was simpler than that. I was afraid of what would come out of my mouth if I let myself speak the moment I smelled that perfume. Callum came down for breakfast like nothing had happened. Shirt pressed. Tie already knotted. He poured his coffee and stood by the counter reading something on his phone, and for a second I almost let it go, the way I had let so many things go these past months, telling myself it was easier, telling myself it was temporary. Then I thought of her hand on my stomach the night before. Automatic. Protective. And I thought, not for the first time, that I was carrying his child in a house that no longer felt like it belonged to either of us. “We need to talk about last night,” I said. He did not look up. “I told you. It ran long.” “Stop it.” My voice came out loud