《The Stars Between Us 》全部章節：第 1 章 - 第 7 章

Chapter One: The Last Signature"You investigated my family behind my back."The words came out raw, unpolished. Maya hadn't meant to say it, not like this, not in front of the solicitor. But after a year of silence, she had reached her breaking point.Across the polished oak table, Liam Carter closed his eyes. Just for a moment. As if he'd known this was coming but still wasn't ready to face it.The solicitor, Mr. Chen, looked up from the divorce papers spread between them. He cleared his throat. "Mrs. Ellison, perhaps we should…""No." Maya didn't look away from Liam. "I'd like an answer first."The room fell silent. Outside, rain streaked the courthouse windows in crooked lines. Inside, the only sound was the ticking clock mounted above the filing cabinet.Liam exhaled slowly. "We're not doing this here."A sharp, bitter laugh escaped Maya. "Really? After everything, this is where you draw the line?"The solicitor shifted in his chair. "I can step outside for a few minutes if…”"Pl

Chapter Three: Reckoning The flat was too quiet.Liam had chosen it deliberately. Third floor. Corner unit. No shared walls on two sides. He had told himself he needed the silence. After everything. The late nights. The locked study. The careful, exhausting business of living two lives at once.Now the silence was the only thing left, and he couldn't stand it.He sat at the kitchen table with a glass of whiskey he hadn't touched, staring at nothing in particular. Outside, Birmingham carried on without him. Indifferent. Unhurried. The kind of city that didn't pause for personal disasters.He had moved out three weeks before the divorce was final. Maya hadn't asked him to. He had simply understood that staying was its own kind of cruelty.He picked up the whiskey. Set it down again.---It was the small things that undid him.Not the divorce itself. He had seen that coming long before Maya had. He had watched it approach the way you watched bad weather on the horizon. Inevitable. Givin

Chapter Five: The InvitationThe envelope was waiting on his desk.Liam Carter stopped in the doorway. He hadn't left it there. His office was always locked in his absence. Yet there it was. Cream-colored paper. No return address. Just his name written across the front in ink so black it almost swallowed the light.He picked up the envelope and turned it over.Sealed with a simple circle of wax. No signature. No initial.This is ridiculous, he thought. Throw it away.But his thumb had already slipped beneath the seal.Inside: a single photograph. And a folded note.The photograph was of Henrik Ellison.Liam recognized him immediately. Not from any deep knowledge, but from the surface of his world. Henrik Ellison. Dead for years now. A mind that had burned bright but been extinguished in what everyone believed was an accident. Liam had skimmed an obituary once. Thought, That's a shame. And then never thought of him again.But now here was his face. Candid. Unposed. He was sitting in wh

Chapter Seven: The Living and the DyingThe hospice smelled the same as it always had.Antiseptic and something floral underneath it, a deliberate choice by whoever had decided that dying people deserved to smell flowers even when there were none in the room. Maya had never minded it. After seven years of walking through that same front door, the smell had become less about death and more about the particular kind of presence this place required of her. The kind that left no room for anything outside these walls.That was what she needed today.She changed into her uniform in the staff room, nodded to a colleague she passed in the corridor, and picked up her first patient file of the morning without breaking stride. She was good at this. The returning. The putting on of the professional self like a second skin that fit better, in some ways, than the one she wore at home.At home she was a woman with an empty house and a locked box on a shelf and too many unanswered questions.Here she