All Chapters of REBORN TO MARRY MY MAFIA ENEMY: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Dr. Hale's office was on the fourth floor of an unremarkable building downtown, and it was nothing like Sera had imagined. There was no long couch and no box of tissues displayed like a warning. There was only a small, quiet room with a rug the color of oatmeal, a window full of plane trees, three armchairs arranged in a loose triangle, and a potted fern that looked quietly loved.Dr. Hale herself was a small, silver haired woman in her sixties, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and the unhurried manner of someone who had never once been startled by a human feeling."Sit wherever feels right," she said. "There is no wrong chair, though people tell me a great deal by the one they choose."Damon took the chair nearest the door. Sera took the one by the window, and noticed with a small pang that he had chosen the seat nearest the exit. Between them, Dr. Hale settled into the third chair, and the gap between husband and wife sat on the rug like a third guest nobody had introduced."I

Sera waited until Saturday night.She told herself it was because the week had been full, and it had been. There had been Theodore's recital rehearsal and Grace's art club and a long board call about Meridian's integration. But the truth was simpler. She had been carrying the words around for three days like a stone in her pocket, turning it over, and she had finally run out of reasons not to set it down.The children were asleep. The house had the hushed, golden stillness it took on after nine o'clock, when the dishwasher hummed and the clock in the hall seemed louder than it was. Damon was in the kitchen, standing at the counter with a glass of water and a folder he was not really reading. He looked up when she came in, and she saw him take in her face the way Nathaniel had taken in the room."Small true thing?" he offered, carefully."Yes," Sera said. "But it is not a small one tonight."He set the glass down. "All right."She had rehearsed this in the car, too, and again it fell a

Thomas Kade had been waiting for her to come.Sera understood this the moment her father opened the door on Sunday morning, before she had even stepped off the porch. He did not say anything about the article, or the Meridian deal, or the strained weeks that had followed. He only looked at her for a long moment, the way he used to look at a ship's manifest when he wanted to see what lay beneath the numbers, and said, "Your mother has taken the children to the market. She insisted. Come and see what I have been building."The workshop at the back of the house had once been a garage. Now it smelled of pine shavings and lacquer, and every surface held a tiny vessel in some stage of becoming: a tugboat with no rigging yet, a four masted barque with its sails unfurled, a bare hull clamped to a wooden stand like a patient waiting for surgery. Her father had taken up ship modeling the year after his heart scare, and he approached it with the same stubborn attention he had once given the whol

The barque sat on the workbench with its second mast leaning at an angle that would have horrified any naval architect in history.Theodore stood in front of it with his hands clasped behind his back, exactly the way his grandfather stood in front of a problem. He was six years old and wearing a pair of oversized safety goggles that kept sliding down his nose. Beside him, Thomas Kade watched with the tender patience of a man who had waited his whole life to be useful to someone this small."It is crooked," Theodore announced."It is," Thomas agreed."You said you would help me glue it straight.""I said I would let you glue it," said Thomas. "I did not say it would come out straight. That was a different promise entirely."Sera, sitting on a stool near the door with a cup of her mother's tea, bit her lip to keep from laughing. Damon leaned against the far wall with his arms folded, and she caught the edge of his smile, quickly hidden, at the sight of his son glaring at the lopsided ma

On the fourth morning of the week, Sera went into her studio and did not come out until the light had changed twice.The room at the back of the house had been hers since the year she first picked up a brush again, after Julian, after everything. It smelled of turpentine and old canvas, and the north window filled it with the kind of light painters spend their lives hoping for. On the easel stood the canvas she had abandoned weeks ago, with its single gray stripe across the bottom.She looked at it for a long time. Then she picked up the largest brush she owned and let the storm come.It came in layers, and she let it. A heavy, bruised sky, charcoal and violet. A sea the color of slate, churned white where the waves broke. She did not plan it. She let her hands move the way they had when she was a girl, before she understood how much paint could tell the truth. The rain slanted across the canvas in long, furious strokes, and the horizon tilted under the weight of it, and for two hours