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All Chapters of The CEO's Discarded Wife Returned With His Twins: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

35 Chapters

Chapter 1 Lapsang at Nine

At nine o'clock on the night someone tried to kill Edmund Calloway, I was warming his teapot.Three hundred people were celebrating his eightieth birthday in the ballroom beyond the service door, and not one of them had asked my name.Rain slapped the high window of the butler's pantry, the cold March kind that blows straight off the harbor. I ran the hot tap into the brown pot, swirled it, tipped it out. Edmund liked his Lapsang Souchong strong enough to strip varnish. Nobody else in the family would touch it. Behind me a caterer's boy was piping cream onto four hundred tiny pastries with the face of a man defusing a bomb."We've got staff for that, Mrs. Calloway," said the head caterer, looking at my plain gray dress, bought on sale in medical school."He likes it a particular way."My clutch was on a folding chair outside the pantry door, because there was nowhere else to put it. At six minutes past nine I found there was no milk and went up the corridor to the kitchen for a jug, a

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

Chapter 2 Noted

I had no answer for him. I couldn't find the first word of one.The paramedics wheeled Edmund out between them, one at his head squeezing the bag, one at his feet steering, and the crowd opened in front of them. I was still on my knees. Someone had knocked the cake knife off the trolley, and it lay on the parquet beside my hand with frosting on the blade. I remember looking at it and thinking, Don't touch that.Rhys put the vial in his jacket pocket and followed the stretcher out into the rain.He didn't look back.---At four in the morning, the family room of the St. Ansel ICU smelled of burnt coffee and the floor cleaner they use on every hospital floor in New England, a lemon that has never met a lemon.My dress had dried stiff. I'd washed my hands and forearms in the visitors' bathroom until the skin went pink, but I could still smell it on the hem. I sat in a vinyl chair under a framed print of a sailboat and read the same laminated sign about hand hygiene forty times.I knew th

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

Chapter 3 Nine-Ten

RhysAt seven on Monday morning the freezer bag was still on his blotter, and Rhys Calloway had not slept since he'd said Sign by Tuesday.Thirty-one floors below his office the container port was working in the rain. The cranes were lifting boxes off a ship out of Rotterdam and setting them down in rows, red and blue and rust.He'd watched cranes since he was six, standing on this same floor with his grandfather's hand on his shoulder. Every box is a promise somebody made, Edmund used to say. We're the people who keep them.His coffee had gone cold an hour ago. He hadn't drunk any of it.His thumb was moving on his ring finger. He felt the band there, smooth and warm, and made himself stop.He pulled a legal pad toward him and wrote it out the way he'd write out any deal that had gone wrong, because that was the only way he knew to think when the ground went.On the left, what he knew.Vial. Grandfather's digoxin, his label, empty. Came out of her bag.She made the tea. Her hands, he

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

Chapter 4 Two Lines

Two pink lines, 6:10 a.m., on the edge of my mother's bathroom sink.I'd bought the test at the all-night pharmacy on Harbor Street at five, along with a bottle of water and a box of ginger snaps, and the man at the register had looked at the three things together and then at my face and said, "Good luck, sweetheart," without saying which way he meant it.I sat on the closed lid of the toilet in Helen's narrow pink-tiled bathroom and looked at the stick for a while.My first thought was arithmetic. My last period had started at the end of January. Obstetricians count from that day, so I was seven weeks pregnant on paper, though the night it really happened was only about five weeks back.The nausea I'd been blaming on night shifts and nerves and the smell of the hospital cafeteria wasn't stress at all. The tiredness wasn't the call schedule. My body had been running a textbook first trimester for weeks while I stood in operating rooms holding retractors and told myself I was coming do

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

Chapter 5 Five Years in Zurich

Professor Sommer's answer was one line long. Yes. Come Monday. Bring warm socks. I.S.Four days later I carried two suitcases up three flights of stairs in Hottingen, to an apartment above a bakery that started baking at four in the morning. For five years I woke every night to the smell of bread and thought, for a second, that someone loved me.The apartment had two rooms, a slanted ceiling, and a window that looked down a steep cobbled street to a slice of the lake. Helen's photograph went on the windowsill. The other thing I'd brought went in the bottom drawer of the dresser, folded in tissue: a small pale-yellow wool baby blanket, worn soft, with a gull stitched in white on one corner.Helen had told me when I was nine that she wasn't the mother who'd given birth to me. She'd been given a baby to keep safe, she said, by someone who couldn't keep me, and she'd loved me from the minute she saw me. The blanket was what I'd been wrapped in. It was the only thing from before.I closed

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

Chapter 6 The Consult Room

My St. Ansel badge photo made me look like a woman who'd been arrested for something petty and was planning to appeal.I clipped it to my scrub top anyway and stood at the window of my new office on the sixth floor. Below me the harbor spread out gray and choppy, and on the far side of it the Calloway Meridian cranes stood in a row along the container quay, red against the March sky. I'd forgotten they were visible from here. I hadn't forgotten anything else.His face from the magazine rack was still behind my eyes. Two days, and it hadn't moved.I turned my back on the window and unpacked my loupes. They lived in a foam-lined case Lorenz had given me when I qualified, and I set them out on the desk as I did on every first day: lenses up, headlamp beside them, battery pack charging. I was humming. I didn't notice until I heard it.---Dr. Trent Kemp gave me the tour at ten. He was the cardiothoracic chief, forty-eight, tall and tanned in the way of men who sail on weekends and mention

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

Chapter 7 Three Hundred Days

Rhys"Four and a half," the little girl had said, before her mother could open her mouth. "Almost five."At ten past three Rhys heard it again, standing at his kitchen window on Lantern Row in the dark.The magnolia in the garden was a black shape against the streetlight. The house ticked and settled around him. He had a glass of water in his hand that he'd poured an hour ago and not drunk. He hadn't been able to lie down.Every time he closed his eyes he saw a pair of green eyes looking up at him from the height of his belt, narrowed, measuring, as if he were a problem she'd been set at school.Almost five.He'd said nothing after that. Margot had said, in that low flat voice she used now, "Dora, take them down to the cafeteria, please." The old woman had herded them out. The girl had gone backwards, still staring at him, the stuffed shark held up under her chin.The boy had gone the other way first. He'd slipped around behind his mother and pressed himself against the backs of her l

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

Chapter 8 Nor'easter

The nor'easter came in on Wednesday afternoon, two days after Rhys asked me how old they were, and it announced itself as sleet thrown against my office window by the handful.The harbor cranes had vanished into it. I turned my back on the window and pulled Edmund's echocardiogram up on both monitors.On the left screen, Trent Kemp's note from January. Four lines. Severe aortic stenosis, critical. Patient frail, aphasic, poor functional status. Not a candidate for surgical or transcatheter intervention. Inoperable. Palliative management advised.On the right screen, the pictures.I watched the valve open and close forty times. I measured it myself, twice, as Ingrid Sommer had taught me: never trust another surgeon's numbers when you can take your own.The valve was thickened and stiff, the leaflets bright with calcium. But it opened. The area came out at a little over a square centimeter. The pressure across it was raised, but not high. The left ventricle was squeezing well.Moderate.

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

Chapter 9 Fides et Fortitudo

PhilipOn Wednesday night, while the nor'easter took slates off half the roofs in Old Harbor and a small boy on Netmaker Lane counted Rhys Calloway's heartbeat, Philip Whitlock slept nine hours without a dream.He always slept well. He considered it a professional skill, like reading a balance sheet upside down across a desk.On Thursday morning he stood at the tall window of his office on the second floor of the Whitlock Trust, unwrapping his first peppermint of the day. Below him State Street was strewn with branches and wet newspaper, and a city crew was dragging a fallen limb off the hood of a parked car. The sky had been scrubbed clean.The peppermint was the old-fashioned kind, a hard white disc striped with red, wrapped in cellophane twisted at both ends. He'd bought them from the same confectioner on Harbor Street for forty years. He put it in his mouth and read his phone.Philip. Have to tell you about this week. Monday the Swiss woman saw old Calloway in consult and Rhys C c

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

Chapter 10 Absolutely Not

The process server found me at the cafeteria register with a tray of tomato soup and a packet of crackers, digging in my scrubs pocket for my badge. He was in his fifties, in a raincoat, with a clipboard and the bored, patient face of someone who did this forty times a week."Dr. Margot Fairley?""Yes."He held out a thick manila envelope. "You've been served."The seal in the corner was the Commonwealth's, and under it, Probate and Family Court, Bramport Division. The first page showed through the window in the envelope. CALLOWAY v. FAIRLEY. Complaint to Establish Paternity.I signed for it the way I'd signed for everything else from Rhys, in one clean stroke without looking up, and he walked away.I read the first page standing there while the line backed up behind me. Shared legal custody. Shared physical custody. Two names I'd chosen in a delivery room in Zurich, typed under his."That'll be six-fifty, hon," said the woman at the register.I paid for my soup. Then I sat down and t

Last Updated : 2026-10-23

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