Alle Kapitel von My Ex Called Me Fat, Now His Father-in-Law Wants Me: Kapitel 51 – Kapitel 60

Chapter 52: Full Marks POV: Odette Cai finished the practice exam with eleven minutes to spare, set his pencil down, and just sat there staring at the last page. The study smelled of pencil shavings and the lemon oil the maid used on the desk that morning. He looked like he wasn't sure what to do with his own hands now that they had nothing left to hold. "Done?" I asked. "I think so." He pushed the packet toward me, careful, like it might still change its mind about being finished. "I don't know if it's right." I went through it while he sat there chewing on his thumbnail, a habit I'd been slowly talking him out of for weeks and clearly hadn't fully won yet. My red pen scratched faint against the paper, the only sound in the room besides the clock. Problem after problem, correct. Not just correct, clean. No crossed-out false starts. No half-erased panic marks in the margins, the ones that used to show up whenever a question circled too close to something he didn't want to think

Chapter 54: A Surprise for Cai POV: Clara The plan needed the storm, so we waited for one, and it obliged us within the week. Thunder rolled in fast that evening, close enough that the windows shivered in their frames. The kind that had already sent Cai into a full flinch at the dinner table days earlier. Elena said storms made people careless. Staff moved slower in the rain, distracted by leaking gutters and flickering lights instead of watching where a nine-year-old wandered off to. She was right. It made this almost too easy. I found Cai in the east hallway around eight, right after Odette had gone to fetch him a change of clothes from the laundry room. Elena had arranged that too, some minor spill on his shirt at dinner that needed handling, nothing that would look staged to anyone glancing at it after the fact. He was alone for exactly the window we needed. The hallway was dim, only every third sconce lit to save on the storm's power draw, and rain lashed hard against the ta

Chapter 56: What He SeesPOV: NikolaiThe storm had knocked half of the estate's lights out by the time I reached the lower corridor, staff voices calling Cai's name from the wrong rooms upstairs, the old house groaning around all of us in the dark like it too was searching.I found the basement door by scent before I found it by sight, some raw, thin thread of my son's terror cutting through the storm and the noise of staff calling his name through the wrong parts of the house.The bolt was thrown. From the outside.I don't remember crossing the last stretch of hallway. I remember my hand on the bolt, throwing it back, and the door swinging open to Cai curled against the far wall, soaked through from some pipe leak overhead, shaking so hard his teeth were audible from the doorway, his voice gone hoarse from screaming into wood that hadn't given him an answer for what must have felt like hours to a nine-year-old, even if the clock said otherwise."Dad." His voice cracked on the single

Chapter 58: Thrown Out POV: Odette Greta got me a cup of tea I didn't drink. My throat was too raw for anything passing through it, so I just sat there with it cooling in my hands, wrapped in a blanket on a kitchen chair, while the house churned around me, staff moving fast in every direction, voices low and clipped in the hallway. Cai wouldn't leave my side. He sat pressed against my arm, still shaking, and fought off every attempt to get him into dry clothes until someone finally just peeled the wet shirt off him mid-conversation, talking to him the whole time so he had something else to listen to. Nikolai went to the security office himself. I only heard about it afterward, from Greta, who'd clearly been given enough of the details to pass along the shape of it, even if she smoothed the worst of it for my sake. The footage from the basement corridor showed all of it. Clara walking Cai down the hallway, her mouth moving in that patient, practiced way she used when she wante

Chapter 60: Black Cars POV: Odette I told Nikolai I needed to go to campus. It wasn't a lie. I had a paper sitting unfinished on my laptop from before any of this started, back when I still had an ordinary life with ordinary deadlines. But that wasn't the real reason. The real reason was that I needed to be somewhere thunder was just weather. He offered me a driver. I said no. "Odette." He stood in the foyer, hands at his sides, careful, the way he'd been careful with me all morning. Like I was something he might break again if he moved too fast. "Let me send someone with you." "I took buses for five years. I'll manage." He didn't argue. He hadn't argued with me about anything since last night. The bus took forty minutes. I sat by the window with my hood up and watched the estate's private road turn into a highway, then into city blocks, then into the cluster of brick buildings where I'd spent the last two years pretending to be a normal student with normal problems.