Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 1 - Chapitre 10

Eva POVI sat on the edge of the tub for a long time after the two lines appeared, my hands still holding the test strip like it might change its answer if I stared at it long enough. It did not change. I set it down on the counter and pressed both hands over my face, and for a while I did not think anything at all, my mind was too full to hold a single clear thought.Eventually I picked myself up off the floor and went to bed, though I did not sleep. I lay on my back staring at the ceiling, turning the same question over and over until it wore a groove into my thoughts. How was I supposed to tell him? Whether I told him now or later, this changed everything, or it changed nothing, and I could not decide which possibility frightened me more.If it changed everything, maybe there was still something worth saving between us, some reason for him to stop and look at me the way he used to before his grandfather's arrangement turned us into strangers sharing a house. If it changed nothing,

Eva POVRichard called me into the study that evening. I knew before I even sat down what he was going to say, but I still held my breath and waited for him to say it out loud."The results came back," he said, no greeting, no softness in his voice at all. "The child is mine."I let out a breath I did not know I had been holding. "You believe it now.""I do not have a choice. It is confirmed." He said it the way he might read a line from a contract, like the words had nothing to do with a person growing inside me at all."So what happens now?""I will support the child financially. Whatever it needs, it will have. That is not in question.""And us?"He looked at me like the question surprised him, like he could not understand why I would even ask it after everything. "There is no us, Eva. There was never going to be an us again after last night. This changes what I owe the child. It does not change anything between you and me.""I was not asking for that," I said, though some small pa

Richard POVI woke to the smell of antiseptic and the sound of a machine counting out my own heartbeat.For a few seconds I did not remember anything. Then it came back all at once, the ice, the headlights, the shape of a woman in the snow with her hand raised against the glare, and I tried to sit up so fast the room tilted sideways."Easy, Mr. Brooks." A nurse pressed a firm hand to my shoulder. "You have a concussion and a cracked rib. You need to stay still.""Where is she?""Who?""My wife. Eva Brooks. She was on the road. She was right there."The nurse's face changed, just slightly, and she looked toward the door instead of at me. "The police would like to speak with you. I will let them know you are awake."I did not like the way she said it. I did not like the way she would not meet my eyes.Two officers came in a few minutes later, one older and heavy, the other young enough that he kept glancing at the floor. The older one introduced himself and then stood there a moment, ha

Eva POVThe first thing I knew was the weight of my own body, heavy and strange, as though someone had filled me with wet sand while I slept.The second thing I knew was pain. It came slowly, in pieces, a dull ache behind my eyes, a sharp pull in my side every time I breathed, and a throb in my left wrist that seemed to beat in time with my pulse. I tried to move my arm and discovered it would not move. Something hard and rough encased it from knuckle to elbow.I opened my eyes.The ceiling above me was wooden, with dark beams crossing it and a pale square of morning light stretched over one of them. It was not my ceiling. It was not the white plaster of my bedroom at the Brooks estate, and it was not the sterile tile of a hospital. The air smelled like woodsmoke and clean linen, and somewhere close by a fire crackled low and steady.For a moment I lay perfectly still, and the night came back to me in broken flashes. The long driveway. The snow. The headlights. Richard's face behind t

Julian POVBy eight o'clock the next morning, Eva Brooks was dead in every newspaper in the city.I read it on the kitchen table with a cup of coffee going cold at my elbow. The headline sat in thick black type above a photograph I recognized, the one from the Brooks Capital charity dinner two years ago, where she stood a half step behind her husband with a smile that did not reach her eyes. *Tragedy on Ice: Brooks Heir's Wife Killed in Late-Night Crash.* Beneath it, a paragraph of careful words. A narrow road, a patch of black ice, a driver who survived and a passenger who did not.A passenger. They had not even bothered to say she was walking.I turned the page, and found the rest. The Brooks family had issued a statement through a spokesman, asking for privacy. A service would be held on Saturday at the family chapel. The casket would remain closed. In lieu of flowers, donations were requested to a hospital fund in her name.A hospital fund. I almost laughed.I folded the paper and