Lahat ng Kabanata ng His Wife On Paper : Kabanata 221 - Kabanata 230

Kian's POV "You look like hell," Drew said, dropping into the chair across from my desk without waiting to be invited."Thanks.""How many nights in the guest room now?""Two." I didn't look up from the report I wasn't actually reading. "Don't you have your own family to bother?""Mitchell's at nursery. Zoey's at work. I'm free." He propped his feet up on the edge of my desk, which I let slide because I didn't have the energy to fight him on it too. "So what happened?""Nothing.""Kian."I set the report down. "I tried to fix something with the dinner, and it backfired, and then Eliora and I had a fight, and now we're not really talking.""What kind of fight?""She said I was unreasonable for wanting Lydia to forgive my mother on my timeline."Drew raised an eyebrow. "Did you say that?""Not exactly.""What did you say exactly?"I thought back through it, trying to find the precise moment things had gone wrong, the way you replayed a meeting looking for where the deal actually died.

Eliora's POV "You don't have to explain yourself to me," I said, setting two cups of tea down on the table between us. "I just wanted to check if you were okay. After the dinner."Lydia wrapped both hands around her cup, the way she always did, like the warmth mattered more than the drinking. "I'm fine," she said. "I've had worse evenings.""You don't seem fine."She looked up at me, and something in her face shifted, not quite a wall coming down, but a crack appearing in it. "She just gets under my skin," she said. "Tonia. Always has.""Can I ask why?"Lydia was quiet for a moment, turning the cup slowly. "Because she had everything I didn't," she said finally. "The marriage that lasted. The money that never disappeared. The ability to walk into a room and have everyone defer to her without question." She paused. "And then she used all of that to hurt my daughter. To take two years away from you and Ezra both. And somehow she still gets to sit at the same table, holding her head u

Kian's POV "You're doing it again," Drew said, watching me over the rim of his coffee cup."Doing what?""That thing where you watch him like he's about to combust." He nodded toward the garden, where Noah and Mitchell were crouched over something in the grass, deep in negotiation about whatever it was. "He's fine, Kian. He's just looking at a bug.""I know he's fine." I didn't look away from the window. "I'm allowed to watch my son look at a bug.""You've been watching for ten minutes.""It's a good bug, apparently."Drew laughed, settling back into his chair, the two of us in my kitchen on a Saturday afternoon while our wives did something neither of us had been invited to and our children conducted serious business in the garden."Mitchell asked me last week if Noah was her brother," Drew said. "I didn't really know what to say.""What did you say?""I said no, but they're family anyway, the kind you get to choose instead of the kind you're born into." He shrugged. "She seemed sat

Eliora's POV "Finally," Kian said, setting two mugs down on the coffee table and dropping onto the sofa beside me, "some peace and quiet.""Don't say that too loud," I said. "The universe is listening.""The universe can wait a day." He pulled my feet into his lap without asking, the way he'd done a thousand times before, and started rubbing the arch of my foot with his thumb. "Drew and Zoey have all three of them until tomorrow. I checked the group chat….they're fine. Mitchell's already 'won' two arguments with Ezra and Noah's been reading the same book since they arrived.""Sounds about right."The house held a kind of silence I'd forgotten existed, not the heavy kind, not the kind we'd lived through during the silent treatment weeks, but the easy, settled kind. No small feet on the stairs. No negotiations happening in another room. Just us, the morning light coming through the kitchen window, and tea going lukewarm because neither of us had the urgency to drink it quickly."I al

Eliora's POV "Nobody move," the photographer said, adjusting something on her camera while Noah, predictably, had already started fidgeting with his collar. "Just two more minutes.""You said that three minutes ago," Ezra pointed out."I'm aware," she said, not unkindly, and gestured for Kian to shift slightly closer to me. "Perfect. Hold there."We'd planned this for weeks, a proper family photo, the kind we'd never quite managed to get done amid everything else, always too busy, too scattered, too consumed by whatever crisis or quiet recovery was happening at the time. But Kian had insisted, the way he did sometimes now, deciding certain things mattered enough to actually schedule rather than hope would happen organically."This feels very formal," I said, trying not to move my mouth too much while still talking."It's supposed to be a little formal," Kian said. "That's the point.""You hate formal.""I've made an exception."Noah, beside me, had gone completely still in the parti