Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Wife He Never Saw: Carrying His Secret Twins In Silence: Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

Tristan's POVI told myself I would call ahead.I thought about it on the drive over, the reasonable thing to do, the thing that would give her the opportunity to prepare rather than arriving unannounced at her workplace in the middle of the morning like a man who had run out of patience with his own hesitation. I had my phone in the console and I picked it up twice at red lights and put it back down both times.If I called ahead she could tell me not to come. That was the practical reality. She could say she was busy, she could say she would call me later, she could construct the polite professional distance that she had been maintaining for six weeks and I would have no ground to argue from because the distance was reasonable and earned and I had done nothing to close it.I did not call.The studio building was a converted warehouse, brick and large windows, the kind of building that announced its purpose without trying. I parked on the street and went to the entrance and gave my na

Elena's POVMy mother's maiden name was Conti.Elena Conti. I had practiced writing it in the weeks before my first appointment at Dr. Patel's clinic, sitting at Marco's kitchen table with a notepad, writing the name in different styles until it came naturally, until my hand produced it without the small hesitation that would come from writing something unfamiliar. It was not a difficult name. It was not far from my own. But there was a specific muscle memory to writing your own name that had to be overwritten before you could sign something else without a visible pause.I had chosen it for practical reasons. My mother's name had no connection to the hospital, to Tristan, to the Cross-Vitale network that I could not fully map but that I knew extended further than I could reliably predict. Elena Rossi was on hospital records, on employment files, on the contract that sat in Tristan's safe. Elena Conti was nobody's wife and nobody's surgical assistant and had no institutional footprint

Serena's POVI had been watching Tristan for three weeks.Not in a way anyone would notice. I was careful about observation, always had been, it was one of the skills that made me effective both in surgery and in the longer game of managing the people around me. You watched without appearing to watch. You gathered information without signaling that you were gathering it. You built a picture over time from small pieces and you did not act on the picture until it was complete.The picture I was building was this: Tristan had gone to Elena's studio. He had come back from that visit with the specific quality of agitation he produced when a situation had not resolved in the way he intended. He had been distracted in the three days that followed, which for Tristan, whose concentration was his most reliable professional asset, was significant. He had been canceling their dinners with increasing frequency, always with a legitimate reason, always phrased with appropriate courtesy, but the patt

Elena's POVThe scheduling notice came through HR on a Wednesday, the same official format as the first one, the same careful bureaucratic language about conflict resolution procedures and the importance of completing the program requirements in a timely manner. A joint session this time. Both parties present simultaneously. Dr. Anand's office, Thursday at noon.I read it at my drafting table and set my phone face-down and picked up my pencil and put it down again.A joint session meant sitting in a room with Tristan for the first time since the gala, where we had stood at a distance from each other for three hours while Serena worked the room in red and Dr. Reyes had looked at my stomach with his trained and involuntary attention. Before that, the conference room at the studio, where I had asked him what it was about and he had not been able to answer and I had held the door and told him to come back when he could.He had not come back.Linda had told me, in one of her quiet informat

Marco's POVI called Elena from my car in the studio parking lot because I needed to be somewhere I could speak plainly without managing the volume of my voice.She picked up before the second ring.I told her I had received the photographs. I told her not to sign anything or return the folder to Serena's office or communicate anything further with Serena about the document until I had spoken to someone who could tell me what we were actually looking at. She said she understood. Her voice had the quality it got when she was managing something that was frightening by treating it as a problem with a solvable structure, which was one of the things about Elena that I had always found both admirable and difficult to watch, because the composure was real and it cost her considerably.I told her I would call her by tomorrow evening.I ended the call and sat in the parking lot for a moment and thought about what I had seen in those eight photographs.Then I called Diane Okafor.Diane had been