Semua Bab The Return Of The Discarded Billionaire Ex-Wife: Bab 181 - Bab 190

Silas's POVI found Clara standing at the stone wall at midnight.This was unusual. She was an early riser who went to bed at a reasonable hour and the only times she was outside at midnight were when something was in her mind that needed the specific quality of the night air and the hills.I did not ask what was wrong. I knew it was not wrong. I brought a blanket and put it around her shoulders and stood beside her.The hills were dark shapes against a sky that had more stars than the city ever showed us.“I was thinking about the second life," she said.“What about it?" I said.“That it is not a second life anymore," she said. "It has been long enough now that it is simply my life. I do not think of it as the alternative or the replacement. It is the one. The only one I have now.""When did that happen?" I said.“Gradually," she said. "I stopped noticing exactly when."We stood in the night air."Is that good?" I said."Yes," she said. "It means the second chance became the thing it

Silas's POVThe family went to the coast.Not just Clara and I. All of them. Eleanor and Edmund who were home for the school holiday. Cassie and James and Ellie. Luke who drove up from the coast where he worked.Adrian came. It was his first time at the coast with all of us. He sat beside me on the walk and talked about the bridge project he was assessing, a Victorian-era iron structure in the southern region that was being considered for heritage listing.Ellie collected shells. Edmund examined the soil composition of the coastal path with the professional enthusiasm he brought to any ground he had not investigated before. Eleanor walked ahead of everyone at the pace she walked things she was thinking through.Luke looked at the sea from a professional perspective for about ten minutes and then stopped and just looked at it the way anyone looked at something very large and very old.At the cafe the elderly woman who had been there since before Clara and I came the first time recogniz

Clara's POVEdmund accepted Dr. Marchetti's collaboration offer.The grant application was submitted with his name as junior researcher and his six years of field notebooks as a primary data source.He was thirteen years old and he was a named researcher on a university grant application.He told us about it at dinner and we received it with the attention it deserved and then moved on to the other things at the table because the other things at the table also deserved attention.Eleanor told us about a structural issue she had identified in the village hall's gutter system, a minor problem that had emerged from an unexpected wind pattern in the first winter. She described the remediation she had already arranged with the contractor.Luke was on a video call from the coast. He had joined dinner virtually the way he sometimes did when he could not be there physically. He told us about a bridge he was now leading the assessment on, the first one where he was the lead engineer rather than

Clara's POVThe night before Eleanor left for university Silas and I sat in the library after she had gone to bed.Not talking. Just in the room. Her desk was clear because she had packed her project materials. Her shelf was reorganized because she had arranged what was staying and what was going with the precision she brought to all spatial organization.Edmund was at the program. The library was quieter than it had been in years."Tomorrow," Silas said."Yes," I said.“She is ready," he said.“She has been ready for two years," I said. "She was simply doing other things first."He looked at the empty desk."She will reorganize the university library within a month," he said."Within a week," I said.We sat in the library of the family home with Eleanor's empty desk and Edmund's investigation corner still holding his equipment because he would be home in three weeks for the holiday and the corner was his."We did this right," Silas said.Not a question. A statement he was making to h

Clara's POVI stood at the hills for the last time in this telling.Not the last time I would stand here. I would stand here again tomorrow and next week and next year and for however many years were given to me. The hills would be what they always were.But this is the last time I am going to tell you about.It was a morning in early spring. The kind of morning where the cold was still present but the light had changed. Something in the angle of it. The specific quality of beginning rather than continuing.I have been standing here for twenty-three years.Not every morning. Most mornings. The mornings when the house was full and the mornings when it was quiet and the mornings when something large was happening and the mornings when nothing particular was happening at all.I put my hand on the stone wall.The cold of it was the same cold it had always been. Real and immediate and exactly itself.I thought about my mother standing here. I thought about what she had seen and what she ha