Lahat ng Kabanata ng MY EX-HUSBAND IS ALIVE AND WANTS ME BACK : Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

The envelope sat unopened on Alessia's lap the whole drive home.She hadn't been able to open it in the specialist's office. She couldn't open it now either. The doctor's voice kept circling back to her — *we'd like to run further tests, Mrs. Sinclair, given what we're seeing* — careful words. Careful enough to be terrifying.Five years of trying. Five years of appointments and disappointments folded into the shape of a marriage no one outside it would have guessed the cost of. She had told herself, driving in, that whatever this was couldn't be worse than another negative test.She wasn't sure that was true anymore.She wanted, more than anything, to put the envelope in Nikolia's hands and not be the only one holding it.Marta met her at the door and told her, gently, that Mr. Sinclair was waiting in his office.Not the bedroom. Not anywhere they had ever sat together to talk about anything that mattered.Alessia's stomach tightened before she'd even opened the door.Nikolia was stan

The room they took her to didn't look like a morgue. It looked like a conference room that had been apologized into something softer — low lighting, a box of tissues placed too deliberately in the center of the table, a woman in a gray blazer whose entire job, apparently, was to say *I'm so sorry* in a voice trained not to break.There was no body to identify. They told her that first, gently, as though it might soften what came after. The explosion had been catastrophic enough that recovery efforts had turned up fragments, personal effects, a signet ring they were fairly certain belonged to him. That was what confirmation looked like now. A ring in a plastic bag.Alessia sat through all of it without crying. She had done her crying already, in a parking lot, on the pavement, before the phone had even finished dying in her hand. What was left now didn't feel like grief so much as a terrible, hollow stillness, the kind that came after a body had spent everything it had.Julian sat two

Alessia called Julian four times before nine in the morning.The first two calls rang out. The third went straight to voicemail. On the fourth, a clipped assistant's voice informed her that Mr. Sinclair was unavailable and unable to say when he might return calls, and something in the careful neutrality of that sentence made the back of Alessia's neck go cold.She tried Dr. Rowan next — the physician who had signed off on the Sinclair family's arrangements after the explosion, whose name she still remembered from a stack of condolence paperwork five years old. His office told her he was traveling. No further information available.She sat at her desk with her phone in her hand and the vanished message still burning behind her eyes. *Your husband wasn't on that plane.* Five years of certainty, and in less than a day it had turned to sand between her fingers, and no one — not one single person who might actually know something — would answer her calls.She told herself it was nothing. A

Alessia's private office had never felt small before. It felt small now, with Nikolia standing in it, filling up space that used to belong entirely to her.She closed the door behind them and turned the lock without thinking about it, some old instinct from a marriage that no longer existed. "Talk," she said. "You wanted alone. You have alone.""Alessia—""Five years." She crossed the room, put the desk between them like a wall she needed. "Five years, Nikolia. I buried you. Do you understand that? I stood in a room with your father and your sister and a bag with your ring in it because they couldn't find enough of you to bring home.""I know.""You know." Her laugh came out jagged. "You know. That's it? That's what you have?""I have more than that. I just can't give you all of it here.""We're alone. You made everyone leave. What exactly are you still protecting me from?"Nikolia was quiet for a moment, and she watched him choose his next words with the same care she remembered from

Nobody answered Aria's question.The silence stretched long enough that Aria's small face began to crumple with the particular uncertainty of a child who has asked something true and watched the room go wrong around her."Mama?" Her voice had lost its earlier bravado. "Why isn't anyone answering me?""Aria, sweetheart—" Alessia's voice cracked halfway through her daughter's name, and she was still trying to find the rest of the sentence when a second small shape appeared in the doorway, backpack already shrugged off one shoulder, a book tucked under one arm."Aria, you left without me, you said we'd—" Adrian stopped mid-sentence.He didn't run in the way his sister had. He never did anything the way his sister did. He stood very still in the doorway instead, dark eyes moving from his mother's face — pale, tear-streaked, unrecognizable in its distress — to the stranger crouched in the middle of the room.Nikolia turned.For a long moment, he didn't say anything at all. Alessia watched