All Chapters of THE PRICE OF LETTING GO: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

The gate was already open when we arrived.The house sat at the end of a long gravel drive, stone and ivy and dark windows, the kind of place built to announce something rather than to be lived in. Only one window on the ground floor had a light behind it.I told the driver to wait.The front door was unlocked.I let myself in. The hallway smelled like dust and something floral gone stale, a house kept clean by people paid to keep it clean and lived in by no one. My footsteps sounded too loud on the stone floor. A grandfather clock stood against one wall, stopped, its hands frozen at some hour that no longer mattered to anyone.“Dominic?”Nothing.I followed the light down a hallway lined with portraits I did not stop to look at, past a staircase wide enough for six people to climb side by side, its banister dark with age and untouched dust along the top rail, into a room that had once been a study.Bookshelves floor to ceiling, spines cracked and faded, the kind of library assembled

I left before either of them noticed I was gone.The driver was still parked at the end of the gravel drive, engine idling, and he did not ask why I was leaving alone. He just opened the door and drove me back to the city in a silence I was grateful for a second time that night.It was almost two in the morning when I got home.I did not turn on the lights. I stood in the dark kitchen with my coat still on and looked at the sculpture on the windowsill, the cup mid-fall, catching what little streetlight came through the glass, and thought about a man sitting on a cold floor with his father’s hand on his back and wondered if I had done the right thing, leaving before either of them could see me go.My phone was still dark from the drive. I turned it back on.Forty-one notifications.I scrolled without reading most of them. Camille, four times. My mother, twice. A number I did not recognize, three times, no name attached. And near the top, the one that actually stopped my thumb.Nicolas.

He was already at the restaurant when I got there, which surprised me, because Dominic Hartley did not choose restaurants like this one. No maître d’ with a reserved list. No private room. A small Italian place on a side street in the West Village, the kind with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu and a single candle stuck in an old wine bottle on every table. The smell of garlic and something baking hit me before I even reached the door.He stood up when he saw me.He had never once done that in four years of marriage. Not at restaurants like the ones we used to go to, where standing up would have drawn a room’s worth of attention he didn’t want. Here, in a place that sat maybe thirty people, nobody looked twice. He pulled out my chair, an old-fashioned gesture I did not remember him ever making before, and I sat down carefully, like the chair itself might have changed too.“You picked this,” I said, sitting down across from him.“I used to walk past it,” he said. “Years ago. Bef

Priya found her in two days.I did not expect it to be that fast. Neither did Dominic, judging by the way he stared at his phone when the email came through, subject line simply CONFIRMED ADDRESS, like the words themselves might rearrange into something less real if he looked away and back.We were at my apartment when it arrived. He had taken to showing up there in the evenings now, not asking, just texting first, which I had decided to allow because the alternative was pretending I did not want him to. Tonight he had brought takeout neither of us had touched, the containers still sealed on my coffee table, forgotten the moment his phone lit up."Read it," I said.He read it out loud, his voice slower than usual, careful, like he was handling something that might come apart if he moved too fast. Wren Calloway, twenty-six, lived in a small town outside Columbus. Worked at a veterinary clinic. No criminal record, no red flags, nothing except an entire life that had apparently been happ

Dominic picked me up at five, and neither of us said much on the drive to the airport.I had packed a bag like I was going somewhere longer than a dinner. He noticed. Didn’t say anything about it, just put it in the trunk beside his own, and something about the two bags sitting there together, mismatched, hers and his, made my throat tighten before we’d even left the city.The flight was short. The drive from the airport to Wren’s house was shorter. By the time we pulled up outside a small blue house with a chain-link fence and a dog barking somewhere behind it, my hands had gone cold in my lap and I could not have told you why.“You okay?” Dominic asked.“No,” I said. “Are you?”“Not even a little.”That, at least, made me laugh, short and real, and some of the ice in my chest cracked loose.Wren opened the door before we reached it. Scrubs traded for jeans and a soft grey sweater, hair down now instead of pulled back, and she looked between the two of us with an expression I could n