Lahat ng Kabanata ng Vows of vengeance: His contract wife : Kabanata 81 - Kabanata 90

TorinThe finca had still smelled of mist and old paper when we loaded the car that morning, the letter from my grandfather tucked carefully into my jacket pocket, and I remember thinking, pulling out of the courtyard, that I had never in my life wanted a drive to simply be a drive as badly as I wanted that one to be.I knew about the fire before the message ever reached her phone.I want to be exact about that, because exactness is the thing I failed to give her in the hour that followed, and I've learned, this past month, that the gap between what I knew and what I said is where all my worst mistakes have lived. The informant who came to me eighteen months ago, the woman who first told me about the hospital swap, had mentioned a registry fire in passing, almost an aside, something she'd heard rather than witnessed. I'd filed it away the way I filed away most things back then, a loose thread in a story I hadn't yet understood I was standing inside of. I hadn't connected it to an agr

RhoswenI didn't show Torin the message that night. I want to be honest about that, sitting here with everything that came after I read it twice in the dark bathroom with the tap running so the sound wouldn't carry, and I put my phone face-down on the counter and told myself I needed daylight before I could ask him anything properly, before I trusted my own voice not to shake in a way that would frighten him more than the question itself.Nine years ago. I did the arithmetic without meaning to, lying awake beside him, his breathing slow and even against my shoulder. Nine years ago I'd been twenty-one, newly engaged to Callum, still years away from the lake, from Graham's hand at my back and the cold water closing over my head. Nine years ago, whatever connection the message meant, I had no memory of Torin Blackwood at all. I'd have remembered a man like him. I was certain of that, lying there, even as some smaller, more frightened part of me understood that certainty was exactly the k

TorinNeither of us had mentioned the sofa, or the thing I'd almost told her, or the thing she'd almost asked, in the hours since. We'd gone to bed instead with the particular tenderness of two people who both sensed a reckoning approaching and had silently agreed to borrow one more soft night before it arrived.I woke before Rhoswen the next morning, the way I had most mornings since the finca, and lay there a long while watching her sleep, memorizing the particular slackness of her face at rest, the version of her that existed only in the hour before the day's armor went back on.I had decided, somewhere in the night, that today was the day. Not tomorrow, the way I'd promised her on the sofa, letting the word sit between us like a stone we'd both agreed to pick up later. Today. I would tell her about nine years ago before another secret found its way to her first, the way secrets in our lives had a habit of doing lately, arriving through anonymous messages and burner phones and borr

RhoswenWe didn't sleep that night, not properly, the two of us turning the word daughter over between us until it lost its shape entirely and became just a sound, familiar and strange at once, the way any word does when you repeat it too many times in the dark."It could mean either of us," I said, somewhere past three, Torin's hand still laced through mine on the study desk. "Me, or Delphine. If the swap happened the way Beatrix's mother described, there's a version of this where the woman at the window kept her own daughter and placed her somewhere she could watch grow up at a careful distance. That could be either of us, Torin. We still don't know which one of us she actually carried.""We need to tell Delphine.""Not yet." I surprised myself by saying it, and watched him turn to look at me properly. "She offered to go back into Graham's house, to listen, to find out what she can from the inside. If we tell her this now, before she's even had the chance to use that access, we migh

RhoswenI used to be good at this. Watching. Cataloguing. Noticing the half-second delay between a question and an answer that told you more than the answer itself ever would. I'd built an entire second life out of that particular skill, two years of surviving as nobody by paying very close attention to everybody, and I'd let it go soft these past months, folded away in a drawer somewhere alongside the rest of the careful armor I'd worn before Torin taught me, slowly, that I didn't need it with him.Three nights in the guest room had taught me things about my own house I hadn't noticed in four months of living in it properly: which stair creaked, which window let in the first grey edge of dawn, how loud silence could actually be when there was no one beside you to fill it.I took it back out on the third morning of his silence.It wasn't dramatic, the way I started watching him again. It was small, almost involuntary noticing which calls he took in the study with the door shut instea