All Chapters of Thirty Days Before I leave: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Chapter 1Sera The words 'I'm getting married again' shouldn't have been able to break a heart that had already shattered two years ago.When your husband tells you he’s getting married again the best thing you can do for yourself isn’t to cry. But I stooped lower than that. Julian walked in without looking at me. He set a thick folder down on the table hard enough. Then he dropped a glossy press sheet right on top of it. “Sign it,” he said. “Now.”I looked at the folder. Then I looked at him. His tie was perfect. His shirt was the kind of white that never wrinkled. His face was the same closed-off mask he had worn every day for three years. “I see,” I said.He waited. I could feel him waiting for the tears or the shouting or the usual desperate questions. I did not give him any of them. I reached for the folder, opened it, and flipped through the pages. Divorce decree. Settlement offer. Non-disclosure. Everything already filled in with my name in neat black print. At the bottom

Chapter 3 Sera I woke up with my cheek throbbing and the taste of blood still in the corner of my mouth. The mirror in the bathroom showed the bruise already turning dark along the bone, purple and ugly under the skin. I pressed a cold cloth against it and stared at my own reflection until the sting settled into something I could ignore. Victoria had put her full weight behind that slap. Julian had stood there and watched it happen. Then he had followed me upstairs like the amendment required and slept on the far side of the bed without saying a word. When I came out of the bathroom he was already dressed for the office, standing by the window with his phone in his hand.**I had been in the dressing room for almost an hour, pretending to sort through the clothes Victoria had left for me. Folding the same dull silk blouse again and again, straightening hangers that did not need straightening, anything to keep my hands busy so the tears from yesterday would stay where they belonge

Chapter 5 SeraHis hand stayed at the back of my neck. My pulse hit hard under his fingers and I knew he felt every single beat.“Julian.” I said his name like a warning but I did not know who I was warning anymore.“I told you to stop looking at me like that,” he said. The sharp edge from before was gone. His voice came out lower and rougher. I had not heard that sound from him in three years of marriage.“Like what?”“Like you already know how this ends.”I could not answer. He stood too close. The memory of Victoria’s slap and the ballroom and the way his hand never left mine all night sat raw under my skin. Whatever this was felt careful and complicated and wrong for a dozen reasons. It was also the first thing in three years that made me feel like I existed to him at all.His thumb moved once against my jaw. I felt him almost pull back. The wall he kept for three years flickered for a second. Then it vanished and he did not pull back at all.“Thirty days,” I whispered. “You sai

Chapter 7SeraI woke before he did, which had never once happened in three years of marriage.Julian slept on his side, one arm still loosely draped across the space where I’d been, his breathing slow and even in a way I’d never had the chance to witness before. In sleep the closed-off mask was gone entirely. No jaw set hard against the world, no eyes narrowed like he was calculating the cost of every word aimed at him. He looked younger like this. Almost unguarded, the way he never let himself be when he knew I was watching.I lay still for a long moment and let myself look. It felt like theft, somehow, taking this version of him when he hadn’t offered it, but I couldn’t make myself stop. Three years of eating breakfast alone, of hearing his car pull in after midnight and pull out again before I woke, of being introduced at parties as “my wife” in the same tone he might have used for “my driver” — and now this. His hand had found my hip sometime in the night and hadn’t let go.I didn

Chapter 9SeraThe flowers arrived at four in the afternoon.I heard the commotion before I saw them. The front bell, the housekeeper’s surprised voice, then footsteps hurrying toward the sitting room where I’d been pretending to read the same page for an hour.“Mrs. Vance.” Marta stood in the doorway holding an arrangement so large she had to tilt her head to see around it. “These came for you.”White lilies. Dozens of them, tall and pale and perfect, their scent filling the room before she’d even set them down.My throat closed.My mother had kept white lilies on her desk at the lab every week I could remember. She said they reminded her that the most beautiful things grew best in the dark first. When she died, I’d buried her with an armful of them, and I hadn’t been able to look at one since.There was a small card tucked between the stems. I knew who it was from before I opened it.Elena’s favorite. Thought you should have something of hers in that house. L.I sat down hard on the