บททั้งหมดของ THE WRONG SISTER : บทที่ 31 - บทที่ 40

She drove back to the estate with both hands on the wheel and the radio off.The city moved around her — morning traffic, people with coffee cups and somewhere to be.Thorne's silence haunted her.She’d asked him the most important question of her life and he’d stood there in his sitting room and said absolutely nothing. And she’d walked out because staying felt worse than leaving, and now she was twenty minutes from home with a note in her bag and a silence in her chest that was getting heavier more and more.She pulled into the estate just after eight.-----Caelum was still in the bedroom when she came upstairs. He was dressed but hadn’t done his tie yet, sitting at the edge of the bed and scrolling through something on his phone.He looked up when she walked in.“You were gone early.” His eyes moved over her face carefully. “Everything okay?”“I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a drive.” She set her bag down and crossed to where he was sitting. His tie was on the bed beside him. She

Three days into it, she started leaving the dining room earlier.Not because she had anywhere urgent to be. Just because the alternative was sitting in the dining room across from Caelum while Rowan stood somewhere behind her left shoulder, and they moved through breakfast like people performing a version of normal that nobody in the room actually believed.“You have the Verdant call at ten,” Caelum said that morning, not looking up from his phone.“I know.”“Silas will sit in.”“I know that too.”He briefly looked up then. Something moved across his face — not quite the wall, but not the warmth either. Something in between that she didn’t have a name for yet.“Good,” he said, and looked back down.She finished her coffee and left the table.The Verdant work was the only thing that felt like hers anymore.She threw herself into it the way she’d been doing since the beginning, except now there was an edge to it — a desperation she hadn’t had before. The corkboard had grown. New photogr

The Calloway deal hit the board table on a Thursday morning. Silas presented it while Caelum sat beside Arwen and said almost nothing, because the numbers said everything that needed saying. The three board members Viktor had been quietly courting went silent one by one as the valuation figures sank in. By the time Silas reached the final page, even Marcelline had uncrossed her arms. The vote to ratify the partnership was unanimous. Afterward, in the corridor outside the boardroom, Caelum stopped walking, turned to her, and looked at her for a long moment like he was still working out exactly what she was made of. “I want you in every strategy meeting from now on,” he said. “Starting Monday.” “I already have the Verdant integration call Monday morning.” “After that.” He started walking again. “Clear your afternoon.” She bit back a smile and followed him.Marcelline caught her before lunch. She was coming out of the office with her phone in her hand when Caelum’s mother appeared

She didn’t tell Caelum. She couldn't tell him.She just sat with that decision through lunch, through an afternoon Verdant call she barely heard half of, through dinner where he talked about the board’s response to the Calloway ratification and she smiled and nodded and said the right things at the right times. She'd been doing that her whole life.But underneath all of it, the only think she could think about was a green silk scarf and a voice on the burner phone she hadn’t heard in months.Isolde was close... really close. That was the part she couldn’t move past, not the call itself, not even the threat sitting in it, but the specific knowledge behind them. The light — a very small, private, detail that nobody inside this estate would think to mention to anyone because it wasn’t remarkable enough to notice unless you were paying very careful attention.Arwen started noticing things she hadn’t noticed before.The housekeeper who always seemed to be in the corridor near her office wh

Arwen’s heart almost jumped out of her chest.Do you know which one this would have been? The question kept replaying in her mind.“Lost,” she said. Her voice came out steady, which surprised her. “A lot of my childhood photos got lost when we moved. My mother wasn’t as careful with mine as she was with Isolde’s.”He looked at her for a moment. “That’s awful.”“It’s fine.” She turned her wine glass. “It was a long time ago.”He accepted it and turned the page. She took a breath of relief.They moved inside as the dark settled properly, the album open on the coffee table between them, the lamp throwing warm light across everything. It should have felt safe: the ring on her finger and the weekend stretched out ahead of them.But now something subtle had shifted in him, and she could feel it.She sat beside him with her wine going warm in her hand and watched him turn pages through Isolde’s documented life.Birthday parties. School events. Summer trips. Isolde at twelve, at fifteen, at s