Alle Kapitel von My Ex Called Me Fat, Now His Father-in-Law Wants Me: Kapitel 11 – Kapitel 20

Chapter 12: The Real Target POV: Odette I retreated to my room after that, the small servant's-wing box that had already started to feel less like temporary shelter and more like a foxhole, and sat cross-legged on the narrow bed with my back against the cold wall, phone in hand, thumb hovering over Maya's contact for a full minute before I finally pressed call. She picked up on the second ring. "Okay, first of all," Maya said, no greeting, straight into it the way only a five-year friendship allows, "I need you to describe the mansion in detail, because I've been picturing it as either a haunted castle or a Bond villain's lair, and I need to know which one I should be more worried about." "Both," I said. "It's both." "Obviously." A pause, and then, softer, her voice shifting into the register she used when she actually meant the next thing she said instead of just performing concern for the bit. "How are you really doing, Od? For real." I opened my mouth to give her the easy ver

Chapter 14' The Treeline POV: Odette Breakfast ended without further incident, though the ghost of that half-second glance lingered with me for most of the day, resurfacing at inconvenient moments, while I was helping Cai sound out a particularly stubborn word problem, while I was folding the one decent sweater I owned, while I was staring blankly at my own reflection in the narrow mirror above my dresser, trying to decide if I'd imagined the whole thing or not. I hadn't imagined it. That was the problem. By the time night fell, I'd successfully buried the memory under a more immediate concern, namely, that Cai had gone unusually quiet during our evening lesson, answering questions in short, distracted syllables, his eyes drifting more than once toward the window as full dark settled over the estate grounds. I chalked it up to exhaustion after yesterday's near-shift and sent him off to bed early, telling myself I'd check on him again once I'd finished my own restless circling of th

Chapter 16: Ghosts in the Filing Cabinet POV: Nikolai The study was dark except for the single desk lamp angled low over a file I hadn't opened in over a year. SOFIA VALMONT, CASE CLOSED, the tab read, in the clean, clinical print of whatever pack investigator had typed the label a decade ago. I'd kept the folder in the bottom drawer of my desk, beneath tax documents and shareholder agreements, exactly where a man buries things he can't bring himself to destroy and can't bring himself to look at either. Tonight I'd pulled it out anyway, for reasons I told myself had nothing to do with the boy currently sleeping two floors above me, and poured a second glass of scotch before I'd even opened the cover. The photographs inside were the ones that never fully left me, no matter how many years passed, no matter how carefully I organized every other part of my life into ledgers and margins and quarterly projections that made sense. The mountain road, slick with rain. The guardrail, twisted

Chapter 18: The First No POV: Odette The silence that followed Nikolai's question stretched long enough that I felt every eye in the foyer, Greta's, the frozen maid's on the stairs, Clara's, his, settle on me at once, waiting to see which version of the last thirty seconds I'd choose to give him. I could have softened it. I could have shrunk the whole exchange down into something small and forgettable, some misunderstanding not worth his time, the way I suspected every previous tutor had done the moment Clara turned her fury on them and Nikolai came looking for an explanation. Groveling would have been easy. Groveling would have been safe. I didn't grovel. "Your daughter came home and found me tutoring Cai in your house," I said, keeping my voice level, meeting his eyes rather than Clara's. "She's upset about that. I understand why, it's her home, and I'm a stranger in it. But I'm not here to take anything from her. I'm here because you brought me here to pay off a debt, and the t

Chapter 20: The First Real Smile POV: Odette I didn't tell Cai about Clara's threat in the hallway. There didn't seem to be any point in handing a nine-year-old one more piece of ammunition for his already exhausting distrust of the people orbiting his life, and besides, some petty, protective part of me had decided this particular battle belonged to me alone, not something to drag into the fragile, hard-won peace of our lessons. So when I sat down across from him that afternoon with a fresh workbook, I did my best to leave the cold weight of that hallway conversation somewhere outside the door, the way you'd wipe mud off your shoes before stepping onto clean carpet. "Word problems again," I said, sliding the book toward him. "But I promise, no family road trips this time." Cai eyed the page warily, the way he'd eyed every workbook since the incident with the car and the twenty-minute stop, some small, learned flinch still present in how he approached the material. But he picked u