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CHAPTER 72: THE CITY CONT’D

Author: Kehinde Rachael
last update publish date: 2026-06-27 05:38:28

He had been managing not just the present thing but the past thing, the guilt and the obligation and the specific complicated weight of a man who had been connected to a girl’s father in ways she didn’t know and had then found himself connected to the girl.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” I said.

He was quiet for a long time.

The road. The light growing.

“I told myself I was waiting for the right moment,” he said.

“But?” I said.

“But the right moment kept being unavailable,” he said. “Because
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  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 86: THE CONVERSATION CONT’D

    The study door at the end of the corridor.“What do you think happens,” I said. “On the other side of all of this. The arrest, my mother knowing, the news coverage, the.” I stopped. “What do you think happens.”Marcus was quiet for a long time.The real pause, the thinking pause, the Marcus underneath the performance taking the question seriously.“I think,” he said slowly, “that the house is going to go through something in the next few weeks that will either break it or clarify it.” He looked at his cup. “And I think the clarification version is available. But it requires everyone in the house to be honest about what they want in a way that is going to cost each of them something significant.”I looked at the window.“My mother,” I said.“She loves him,” Marcus said. “In the way she loves him, which is real and is also.” He paused. “Not the primary love of her life. I think she knows that. I think she’s known it for a while and has chosen not to look at it directly.”I thought about

  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 85: THE CONVERSATION

    BELLA’S POVI left the study at two.Not because I wanted to. Because my mother’s footsteps had been in the corridor twice in the twenty minutes since Dominic’s hand had closed around mine and the second time they had paused outside the study door and then moved away and I understood the pausing.I stood up.He looked at me.I looked at our hands, still joined on the desk, and I looked at him and I did the thing that cost the most, which was let go.I stood.“She’s ready,” I said.He looked at the desk where our hands had been.“Yes,” he said.I went to the door.At the threshold I stopped because everyone in this house stopped at thresholds and I had been in it long enough to have absorbed the habit.“Dominic,” I said.“Yes,” he said.“Tell her everything,” I said. “The full version. She’s stronger than you think.”He looked at me.“I know how strong she is,” he said.I went through the door.My mother was in the sitting room.She had changed since the morning — not dramatically, the

  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 84: MONDAY CONT’D

    The quality of the silence that followed — not the library silence or the dinner table silence or the kitchen silence. The silence of a room that has just received too much at once, that is attempting to process simultaneous impacts, that needs a moment before it can do anything with what it has been given.“Bella,” she said.Her voice had changed.Not the flat emptied voice. The other one, the older one, the voice of my mother when she was frightened.“I know,” I said.“You were with him,” she said. “For eighteen months. While he—”“I didn’t know,” I said. “Mum. I didn’t know. I had no idea. If I had known—”“I know you didn’t know,” she said. Quickly. The quick clarification of a woman who was frightened and grieving and putting things in the right order with the discipline she always used when the alternative was falling apart. “I know that.”I looked at my hands.“Are you all right?” she said.I looked up.She was asking me. In the middle of receiving news about her husband’s deat

  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 83: MONDAY

    BELLA’S POVI was awake at five.Not the gradual wakefulness of recent days. The immediate kind, the eyes-open-and-already-knowing kind, the body having apparently decided that today required no transition between sleep and full consciousness.Monday.I lay in the dark for exactly four minutes.Then I got up.Dominic was in the study.I knew this without going to check — the line of light under the door visible from the corridor, the study occupied at five in the morning, the quality of a man who had also not transitioned gently into the day. I stood in the corridor for a moment and looked at the line of light.I did not knock.I went to the kitchen.I made coffee.I sat at the kitchen table and I thought about Reeves.He had said morning. He had said he’d call when it was done. He had said the police would need to move quickly once they had the file because the window between filing and Daniel finding out was not a large one.I thought about Daniel in his flat.The dark blue Volvo. T

  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 82: THE DAY BEFORE CONT’D

    He was looking at the bloom and his face was the morning face and the October light was the October light and we were crouching at the edge of the east bed on a Sunday morning one day before Monday with the house behind us and the fragile certain bloom in front of us.“Dominic,” I said.He looked at me.The close range.No table.No architecture.Just the bed and the bloom and the October morning.“After Monday,” I said. “After my mother knows about my father. After the police and Reeves and Daniel and all of it.” I kept my eyes on his. “What happens to us.”The question.Not the storage unit question — that had been the hypothetical, the if my mother wasn’t in the picture. This was the actual question. The real conditions, the real picture, all of it in place.What happens to us.He looked at the bloom.He was quiet for a long time.The garden around us. The fountain. The Sunday morning.“I don’t know,” he said.The honest answer. The same honest answer as the car — not the reassuran

  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 81: THE DAY BEFORE

    BELLA’S POVDaniel replied at seven in the morning.I was still in bed, the specific Sunday morning wakefulness that had been arriving earlier every day this week, the body refusing to stay unconscious when there was this much happening in it. The phone lit up on the pillow beside me and I looked at it in the grey early light.Thank you. Where and when.Four words. The fear still in them but underneath the fear something else now — relief. The relief of a person who had been waiting for a response and had received one and could now move toward whatever they had decided they needed to do.I looked at the message.I did not reply.Not yet. Reeves had said Monday. Dominic had said don’t meet him alone. I had sent soon to keep Daniel contained, to stop the escalating messages, to give him enough to hold onto through the weekend without giving him anything real.It had worked.He was contained.I locked the phone and put it face down and looked at the ceiling.Sunday.The last day before M

  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 40: FRIDAY EVENING

    BELLA'S POVI had not planned the library.This was the truth of it, and I was committed, in the thirty-six hours of the house's new configuration, to the truth of things — the small, specific honesty of admitting what was planned and what was not, what was chosen with the full deliberate attention

  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 37: LYDIA LEAVES FOR THE WEEKEND

    BELLA'S POVMy mother announced it at dinner on Friday.Not the announcement of someone asking, my mother did not, in my experience of her, ask for things she had already decided. She announced with the warm, fait-accompli energy of a woman who had arranged her life according to her own preference

  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 36: WHAT SHE WEARS TO BREAKFAST CONT’D

    BELLA'S POV The dining room at eight-thirty had its usual Saturday quality. Or I was aware, coming through the door, that I was noticing this with more attention than usual, the quality of the room, the specific configuration of a Saturday breakfast: my mother absent still, her weekend hour was

  • HER MOTHER’S HUSBAND   CHAPTER 34: THE POOL RULE CONT’D

    BELLA'S POV I was going to have the conversation. I had not planned this. The conversation had not been an item on any list I'd made between the ceilings at two and three and four in the morning. But I was here and the schedule was there and he was going to come back and the kitchen was a room i

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