Lahat ng Kabanata ng His Wife On Paper : Kabanata 181 - Kabanata 190

Eliora's POV "Drew cried for twelve minutes," Zoey said, wrapping both hands around her mug. "I timed it." I stared at her across the kitchen table."Twelve minutes," I repeated."Twelve minutes and forty three seconds if we are being precise." She took a sip of her tea with the serene expression of someone who had witnessed something extraordinary and had been waiting to tell someone about it. "I would have stopped timing but I was too fascinated.""Zoey." I put my mug down. "You are telling me that Drew proposed and your first instinct was to time how long he cried?""My first instinct was to say yes," she said. "The timing was a close second." She smiled widely. "I said yes before he finished asking. He said I didn't let him get to the good part of the speech.""There was a speech?""Apparently." She waved her hand. "I didn't hear most of it. I was already crying."I looked at her across the table, at my best friend. Sitting in her kitchen in the middle of a Wednesday morning w

Eliora's POV "Don't you dare cry yet," Zoey said, pointing at me in the mirror. "We have an entire ceremony for crying and you are going to save it.""I'm not crying," I said."You are doing the pre-cry.""I'm not doing a pre-cry. Whatever that means." I said through my broken voice at the end."You have had a pre-cry since 1999 and I have been watching it happen for twenty five years and I know exactly what it looks like and it is happening right now on your face."I pressed my lips together and looked at my reflection and tried to make my face do something other than what it was doing. It didn't cooperate. Zoey made a sound of mild exasperation and reached for the tissue on the dressing table and handed it to me without a word.I took it."Don't smudge anything," she said."I'm not—""Eliora.""Fine," I said. "I'm doing the pre-cry."She looked at me in the mirror with the expression she used when she was feeling something large and had decided to address it practically rather tha

Eliora's POV "I need air," I told Zoey on the phone. "Come out with me.""Right now?""Right now."A pause. Then, "Give me twenty minutes." The sound of her already moving around in the background, keys, shoes, the specific organised chaos of a woman with a one year old getting herself out of the house. "Mitchell is with Drew so I have exactly…Drew!" she shouted away from the phone, "how long do I have?" A muffled response. "Three hours," she reported back. "Make it worth it.""Three hours is plenty," I said."For you maybe. I haven't had three uninterrupted hours since Mitchell learned to crawl and decided the world was her personal obstacle course."I laughed and told her I would meet her outside the coffee place on Birch Street and she said fine and hung up before I could change my mind which was very Zoey and also very necessary because I had been sitting in the house since morning doing the specific nothing that happened when you had news sitting in your chest that you hadn't s

Eliora's POV "I want the one with the big eyes," Ezra announced, pointing at the pancake batter with the authority of someone placing a very specific order. "And a smile. A big one. Not a small one like last time.""Last time's smile was perfectly adequate," I said, pouring batter into the pan."It was too small," he said firmly, climbing onto his chair and arranging himself with the focused energy of someone settling in for something important. "Mitchell's mummy makes big smiles.""Mitchell's mummy," I said, "has been making pancakes for thirty years.""You should practice more," he said. Very seriously. Completely without malice.Kian, at the counter with his coffee, made a sound that was definitely a laugh converted very poorly into a cough. I pointed the spatula at him without turning around. He said nothing.The tension from the last two days was still there, I could feel it in the specific quality of the morning, the way Kian and I had been moving around each other carefully, n

Kian's POV "You left," Drew said, handing me a beer I hadn't asked for and sitting down across from me. "Just walked out.""Yes," I said."On a pregnant woman.""Drew.""I'm not judging," he said, in the tone of someone who was a little bit judging. "I'm just establishing the facts." He settled back in his chair and looked at me the way he looked at things when he had already formed an opinion and was deciding how much of it to share. "What happened?"I told him. Not everything, I didn't need to give him everything, Drew had never needed everything to understand the shape of a thing. I told him about Lydia and the coffee and the “our house” moment and the phone call and then the fight. The real one. The things we said.He listened without interrupting which was how I knew he thought it was serious because Drew's default was to interrupt.When I finished he was quiet for a moment."What did she say?" he asked. "The thing that made you leave."I looked at my beer. "She said she learn