Semua Bab One Betrayal Is Enough: Bab 21 - Bab 27

Adrian ended things with Claire.He didn't tell me. The lawyers mentioned it while sorting through joint assets.He transferred the Paris apartment back into my name alone, let Claire keep the fees and record earnings she had legally earned, and didn't use the breach clauses to wreck her career.He also resigned as chairman of the foundation.Victor left the group's board, and Margaret stopped taking any part in Blackwood Manor affairs.The people who had covered for him were finally starting to pay for it.None of it made me want to go back and look.Three months after I left, I received the first letter from Adrian that the lawyers didn't return unopened.Not because I had changed my mind.Because Helen thought it might affect the mediation.The letter was one page.Evelyn,I always said Claire wasn't important, that you were the only one I loved. Only now do I understand that those words weren't an explanation. They made what I did crueler.I knew she wasn't worth losing you and I s

Six months after the divorce, Claire gave a live interview.The program was promoted with a deliberately inflammatory title.My Two Years With the Vampire Duke: Was I Really Only His Mistress?I hadn't planned to watch.Then Helen told me Claire had described how the Blackwood family concealed things, which might affect the foundation's internal review.The Claire in that interview looked far more worn than she had at the anniversary dinner.She wore hardly any makeup, and there was no necklace covering the side of her neck anymore."I knew he was married."She didn't deny it when the host asked the first question."I also knew the duchess wouldn't accept a third person.""Then why start?"Claire was quiet for a long time."Because he made me feel that I was special.""Everyone told me the duke would never divorce, but he was willing to give me things an ordinary person never gets in a lifetime.""A house, a career, protection, and his blood.""I thought if enough time passed, he'd be

Twenty years is short for a vampire.Short enough that it leaves no line on a face and no weariness in the body.And long enough to bring an abandoned house back to life.The museum my mother never finished finally opened.The first and second floors show work by young artists, the garden became an open-air theater, and the cellar keeps a fully blacked-out space where vampire artists can rest through the day.In our first year we received forty applications.By the twentieth, the Hartwell youth art program had six branches across Europe.We have helped a vampire violinist whose family forbade her to perform, and funded a human artist who lost both hands in a war and began composing with his voice instead.One year a young painter asked me why the museum's emblem is an open window.I told her it was the only thing my mother drew three times on her plans.Later I found my own explanation for it.A door needs someone else's permission to open. A window lets a person trapped in a room see

A hundred years after the divorce, I went back to London.The city had become almost unrecognizable.Driverless cars ran along the old streets, the company that made the documentary had folded long ago, and the arguments about Adrian and me had turned into archive material.Young people occasionally saw our photographs in a museum.They knew the Duke of Blackwood had once had a famous marriage, and they no longer raged over a collapsed love story the way people had a century before.Time's greatest kindness to humans is that most pain eventually leaves along with the people who lived it.Vampires remember.I went back to London for Victor's funeral.Seventy years earlier he had lost the ability to turn in an accident, and in the end he chose to die the way a human does.Late in his life he wrote to apologize to me.He admitted that he hadn't helped Adrian hide the affair because he truly believed a human lover didn't matter.He had envied Adrian for having a faithful marriage that none