Semua Bab Cursed To Love You: Bab 71 - Bab 80

The kitchen had been declared a Caden-free zone by unanimous vote."It was one bread roll," Caden said, from the doorway, banned but unwilling to leave the conversation entirely."You threw it," Isla's mother said, not looking up from the pot she was stirring."I tossed it. Gently. To Sloane.""You hit the good china.""The china survived.""The china has a chip in it now, Caden.""A small chip. A character chip."Sloane, seated at the table, said nothing, which everyone understood to mean he agreed with Isla's mother completely and had no intention of being dragged into the defense."Out," Isla's mother said, pointing a wooden spoon at the door. "You can come back for dinner. Not before."Caden retreated, mock-wounded, and found Odette in the hallway, who took one look at his face and said, "What did you do," without even asking for details."I threw a bread roll.""Of course you did."Dinner that night was loud in the way only a house full of people who loved each other could be lou

The cliff held everyone the wind allowed it to hold, chairs set in careful rows against the grass, the sky doing its usual Clare thing — grey, then briefly gold, then grey again, like it couldn't decide how much beauty to allow in one morning.Nobody had marked the exact spot. They didn't need to. Isla had told her mother where the chairs should stop and where the small clearing at the very edge should stay open, and her mother had simply nodded, understanding without being told why.Zachary stood there now, at the edge, Caden on one side with a folded speech pressed flat against his chest like it might escape, Reid on the other, steady and quiet. Behind them, Sloane stood with Lyra close enough that their shoulders touched, neither of them making anything of it, both of them clearly aware of it anyway.Then the small crowd turned, and Isla appeared at the top of the path.She walked with her mother on one arm.Nobody on the other.She'd thought about it for a long time, in the days a

They stood outside for another minute before the cold finally won, and Zachary tugged her back toward the door."One more hour," she said. "Then I'm done being a bride.""You'll always be a bride.""You know what I mean."Inside, the last stretch of the reception had settled into something slower, fewer people, the music quieter, her mother sitting with Caden's father at a corner table, deep in a conversation neither of them seemed in a hurry to end.Isla noticed it and said nothing, just filed it away the way she filed everything away, and pulled Zachary back onto the floor for one more dance before the night let them go.The inn was a ten minute drive down the coast road, and by the time they got to their room it was past one in the morning, both of them heavy-limbed and quiet in the particular way that comes after a long day of being watched being happy.The room was old, slightly drafty, a window taking up most of one wall, looking straight out at black water.Isla crossed to it i

New York took them back the way it always did — loud, indifferent, entirely unbothered by the fact that they'd just come from a week of feeling enormous things on a cliff in Ireland.The apartment was quiet when they got in, bags dropped by the door, and Isla stood in the middle of the living room for a moment just looking around."It feels different," she said."Different how?""Like it knows something permanent happened." She walked over to the windowsill, where the plant he'd bought her from the street market was thriving, two new leaves unfurled since they'd left. "Look at that.""It's a plant, Isla.""It's a sign.""Of what?""I haven't decided yet. But it's definitely a sign."The first week back fell into a rhythm that was loose and slightly chaotic in the specific way of two people whose schedules didn't quite line up. Isla spread large sheets of paper across the kitchen table every morning, sketching preliminary plans for Dublin, and Zachary eased back into Cole Global in car

They agreed without much discussion at all."Not yet," Isla said, still sitting on the counter, the test wrapped carefully in a paper towel beside her."Not yet," Zachary agreed."The second Caden finds out, it stops being ours.""It becomes an event.""A very loud event."He almost smiled at that, still standing close, one hand resting on her knee. "We can have a day. Just one. Before it's everyone's.""One day," she said.The day passed with a strange, shifted weight to it, the way days do when you're carrying something that changes everything and haven't told anyone yet.He brought her coffee mid-morning, setting it down beside her sketches without a word, and she looked at it for a second longer than usual, thinking, absurdly, that this was the first coffee of an entirely different life, though the coffee itself looked exactly the same.She sat with her Dublin drawings spread across the table and found herself looking at them differently now, recalculating timelines in her head —