All Chapters of The CEO's Discarded Wife Returned With His Twins: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The gray truck liked the corner of Netmaker Lane, so on Monday I drove the twins to school the long way: up Chandler Hill, around the water tower, back down through the Heights. Eleven extra minutes. Nowhere near that corner.It hadn't been there that morning. I'd checked from the bathroom window at six, and again at seven, and again while I was buckling Pippa in. The corner had been empty except for Dora's recycling bin and a gull eating something it shouldn't.I went the long way anyway."Why are we going up a hill?" Pippa demanded from the back."Scenic route.""What's scenic?""It means there's a view."She inspected a row of garages and a closed laundromat. "This is a bad view."Bramport Harbor Day School stood on a slope above the inner harbor in a Victorian building that had once been a sea captain's house, gray-shingled, with a widow's walk on top and a newer brick wing behind.The junior kindergarten was in the old part. Its windows had been made from sea glass somebody's gra

CUP. TREE. MARGOT.The words were written on the whiteboard at the foot of Edmund's bed in blue marker, in tall careful capitals, with a little drawing beside each one: a cup with steam coming off it, a lollipop tree, and a stick figure with a scribble of dark hair and what I chose to believe was a stethoscope rather than a noose.Edmund was sitting up against his pillows, glaring at the board, hunting for the trick in it.Philip's peppermint was still in my coat pocket. I'd put it there yesterday by the window and hadn't taken it out, and I hadn't eaten it, and every time my hand went into that pocket for my pen my fingers found the cellophane twist and stopped. I didn't know why I hadn't thrown it away. I hung the coat on the back of the door."He's been looking at that since ten," said the woman by the window. "He hates it. It's very good for him."Yvette Moreau was thirty-eight and wore her dark hair cropped close and a cardigan the color of a tomato. She was the speech and langua

I spent what was left of Saturday telling myself Vivienne Sutter's parting line meant nothing, and on Sunday I did the thing I'd been putting off for five weeks.The wind had turned in the night. I woke at six to it pushing at the back bedroom window, and it wasn't the raw, sleety wind of the past month. It was soft. It smelled of mud and wet grass.The first mild day of the year, the Sunday of the long Patriots' Day weekend, and by eight Dora was out on her front step in a cardigan with her eyes shut and her face turned up to the sun.By ten I'd handed the twins over. Tamsin had promised them the swings at the harbor park, then lunch at Dora's, where there would be clam chowder, which Pippa claimed to hate and ate three bowls of every time.Tamsin took one look at my face on the doorstep and asked where I was going. I said, "A drive." She said, "Not without your phone charged," and checked it herself.On the passenger seat beside me was a bunch of crocuses from Helen's yard, wrapped

At ten past seven on Thursday morning, every phone in the sixth-floor OR lounge was showing me the same diamond."'He asked,'" the scrub tech by the coffee machine read aloud, in a breathy little whisper that was meant to be Vivienne Sutter and was, unfortunately, quite good. "'I said yes.' Pause. 'Again.' Ring emoji." She held the phone up so the anesthesia fellow could see. "Look at the scarf. That's his company logo. That's the anchor.""That's not a scarf," the fellow said. "That's a press release."I was eating dry toast. I had a mitral repair at eight and a redo sternotomy after lunch, and dry toast was what my stomach would accept at seven in the morning before a long day. It was cold and slightly bent. I kept eating it.The lounge at St. Ansel was a narrow room with blue vinyl couches, a fridge covered in passive-aggressive notes about yogurt, and a television bolted high in the corner, permanently tuned to a local news channel with the sound off. On the whiteboard someone had

Two words. I had carried them around all weekend, through Saturday's laundry and Sunday's pancakes and a night of lying awake listening to the foghorn off the harbor mouth. *Her. True.*At five-forty on Monday morning I was standing behind the rope at Logan arrivals with a paper cup of terrible coffee, and when Lorenz came through the sliding doors, tall and rumpled behind his wire glasses, a canvas bag over one shoulder and a paper sack held against his chest, I didn't say hello."Edmund spoke a sentence," I said.He stopped in front of me. "Which sentence?"I told him. He stood there holding the sack while a family with a luggage cart steered around us, and his eyes behind the glasses did something complicated. Then he set the sack down on his bag as if it held eggs, put both arms around me, and held on."Good," he said into my hair. "Margot. That is good."When he let go he was a cardiologist again. "His rate?""A hundred and twelve at the top. Back to ninety in four minutes.""And