All Chapters of The CEO's Discarded Wife Returned With His Twins: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

"Dr. Fairley," Ambrose announced at the dining-room door, and from somewhere inside a young woman's voice said, "Her?"Beatrix didn't break stride. She came in ahead of me on her cane, tall and black-coated, and said to the room at large, "Dr. Margot Fairley. The surgeon who looked at my heart in Zurich. I have funded her work ever since. She is my guest, and you will all be charming." She handed Ambrose her gloves. "Sloane, close your mouth. You look like a cod."The dining room at Whitlock Hall ran the width of the house, with three tall windows at the far end full of gray, bright sea. The table was long enough for twenty and laid for five. Silver, crystal, white tulips down the center.Above the sideboard hung a seascape in a heavy frame, a ship going down in a storm with every sail set. I decided not to read anything into that.At the end nearest the door, a man was rising to his feet."Dr. Fairley. What a pleasure. Philip Whitlock." He came around the table with his hand out. "I'

23:40. Heart rate 38.The number was glowing green on the monitor above resus bay three when I came through the doors, and the name on the whiteboard beside it, in a triage nurse's quick black capitals, was CALLOWAY, E.My pager had gone off on the sixth floor while I was writing up a post-op note. ED resus, 85M, brady 30s, known cardiac, your pt per Okafor. I'd taken the stairs. Six floors, two at a time, my stethoscope bouncing on my chest. Felix would have counted them. I knew the number anyway, because Pippa had announced it on my first day: ninety-two, counting the broken one.The bay was crowded and too bright, and it smelled of alcohol wipes and wet coats. An emergency resident, a respiratory therapist, two nurses, a paramedic finishing his handover by the curtain. In the middle of it, on the gurney, under a white blanket, was Edmund.He was gray. Not the gray of the ballroom floor, the gray of a heart that has stopped, but a duller color, waxy, the gray of a man who has been s

"Two scoops is a normal amount for a shark."Pippa had planted her palms on the counter of the ice-cream kiosk, which came up to her chin, and she was addressing the teenager inside it like a judge who'd been wrong before. The kiosk had opened for the season that morning, and the boy's paper hat was still stiff from the box."You're not a shark," said the boy."I'm part shark. On the inside." She looked over her shoulder at me. "Mama, tell him.""She's mostly girl," I said. "One scoop.""Mama.""One scoop, and it can be any color you like."She turned back to the boy, unbeaten. "Blue," she said. "The bluest one. And he's paying." She pointed past me without looking to the tall man in the navy coat who was standing exactly ten feet from my left elbow with his wallet already out.Rhys paid.---Tamsin's terms for the visit had arrived by email at eleven on Thursday night, numbered, in bold. Public place. Two hours. Margot within ten feet of the children at all times. No photographs. No

"Can DNA be shark?"The technician, a young man with a shaved head and a lanyard covered in cartoon molecules, leaned over the counter toward Pippa and took the question seriously, which I liked him for."Not yours," he said. "Yours is people.""But it could be a little bit shark.""Everybody's a tiny bit fish, way back," he said. "But no. No shark."Pippa turned to me with the face of a client whose lawyer has let her down.It was eight on Tuesday morning, in a beige room above a dentist's office off the highway: the genetics lab the Probate and Family Court used when it wanted to know who belonged to whom. A counter, four plastic chairs, a poster about cheek cells, a box of swabs in paper sleeves. Rhys was already in one of the chairs.Tamsin had fought the order for a week and lost on the law."The presumption makes it a formality," she'd told me, eating a pear over the sink at Netmaker Lane. "If we refuse, it looks like we've got something to hide. We haven't. So they get one swab

Tamsin was eating a granola bar in the courthouse lobby at ten to nine, with a binder under her other arm thick enough to stop a door in a gale."Carrow called me at eleven last night," she said, before I'd gotten my coat off, "and said nothing useful. For nine minutes. He asked after my health. He asked if I'd had a nice Easter. He said his client 'wished to be heard this morning,' which, yes, Benedict, that is what a hearing is." She bit the granola bar in half. "Which means they've got something.""What kind of something?""No idea. That's what scares me." She steered me toward the security line with her elbow. "Come on. I've got fourteen reasons the judge is going to laugh them out of the room and I want to say all of them before ten."The Probate and Family Court was red brick on Court Square, its white columns painted so many times they'd lost their edges. Inside it smelled of floor wax and wet umbrellas, and everyone was stamping off the last spiteful sleet of the year.We foun