He had always been mine のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 161 - チャプター 170

KILLIAN POV Maya was waiting at the table when I opened the door.Leigh was still at school. The apartment was quiet in the way it only got midmorning, before the afternoon filled it again. Maya had her hands wrapped around a cup that had stopped steaming. She looked up when I came in, and the question was already on her face before I spoke.“I said it,” I said. “Exactly what I told you last night. That the hold is still there. That it doesn’t get a vote. That I choose this apartment. You. Leigh. That I won’t answer if he messages.”She closed her eyes once. When she opened them they were wet and steady.“What did he say.”“That it wasn’t clean. That I was using his refusal as proof of progress. That if I only meant it in that room, he’d know—and he wouldn’t stay gone out of courtesy.” I sat down across from her because standing felt like I was still in his office. “Then he told me to walk. I walked. I didn’t message him. I messaged you.”Maya’s hands tightened on the cup. She was si

KILLIAN POV A week after the speech in his office, the silence still held.No messages. No cars. No door opening hard enough to send Lang out of the room. Brandon had done what he said he would do when I walked out—he had stayed gone, and the going was its own kind of pressure, exactly as he had promised. The hold under my ribs did not leave. It showed up at two in the morning, at the sink while the coffee brewed, in the middle of a grey passage that was finally resolving on the canvas because I had nothing else to interrupt it. I did not give it a vote. I got up. I made breakfast. I walked Leigh to the corner when Maya asked me to. I came home when I said I would. The days accumulated like evidence that the answer could stand, and every night I lay on the sofa—still the sofa, the pillow still in Leigh’s room—and waited to see if the next day would be the one where the silence broke from his side or mine.Maya watched.She did not ask every evening if he had messaged. She asked with

KILLIAN POV Two weeks after the speech, the silence was still intact—and the hold had learned the shape of the hours when the apartment was quietest.It came most nights around two. Not a message. Not a knock. Only the pull under the sternum, the memory of a door, the particular silence of a penthouse above the city. I lay in the bed beside Maya and breathed through it without reaching for the phone. The first few nights she had been awake too; I had felt it in the stillness of her body. Lately she slept through, or pretended to, and I did the work of not voting alone in the dark until the pull eased enough to let me sleep again. In the morning I got up. I made coffee. I was present for the boots and the bag and the walk to the corner. The answer was still standing. It was also still work, every day, and the work did not get lighter just because Brandon had not broken the silence from his side.Maya noticed.On a Wednesday evening after Leigh was asleep she sat at the table with a cu

KILLIAN POV Three weeks after the speech, ordinary life had started to feel less like a performance and more like a place I could be tired in.The hold still came at two. I still did not vote for it. In the morning I was still in the bed when Maya woke, and she still checked my face in the first second as if the night might have written something on it I had not told her. Most mornings there was nothing new to tell. No messages. No letters after Harlow’s one page. No door. The silence from Brandon’s side had become a fact the household organized itself around without naming every hour. Leigh stopped asking about the pillow. The sofa went back to being a place for reading and puzzles. Lang stopped looking at me like I might leave mid-sentence when a phone buzzed.On a Monday evening Maya asked me to stay in the kitchen after Leigh was asleep. She did not stand at the counter. She sat. She pushed a second cup of tea toward the place across from her and waited until I took it.“I need t

BRANDON POV Three weeks of his silence and I had started to hate the taste of my own strategy.The reports still came. Studio. Apartment. School corner. A fever night where both adults stayed in the child’s room until dawn and no one left the building. Remington noted it the way he noted everything—flat, complete, without the commentary I did not ask for and somehow still wanted. Killian was holding. The marriage was holding hard enough that the pillow had stayed on the big bed and the child had spent a sick night between them. Harlow had gone quiet again after the call Lang had screened. Elena had nothing new to say. My father had stopped calling to warn me off the trust. The board wanted decisions I gave them half-present. And every night I went home to a penthouse full of his paintings and a phone I did not use, and the claim under my ribs sat up in the dark and asked the same question it had been asking since he walked out of the office: *How long are you going to wait for a man