Losing to love のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 11 - チャプター 20

Alexandria’s POVI heard him moving around downstairs at two in the morning.I wasn’t asleep. I’d been lying in the guest room with the lights off, staring at the ceiling and turning his apology over in my hands like something I’d found on the ground and didn’t know if it was valuable or dangerous. I’m sorry, Alexandria. Three words, quietly, to nobody. Like he hadn’t meant for me to hear them and that was exactly why they were stuck in my throat.The footsteps moved from the kitchen to the study. Then back. Then stopped.I told myself I didn’t care. I pressed my face into the pillow and closed my eyes and tried to find sleep somewhere in the dark. But my body was doing things it hadn’t asked my permission for — the low persistent ache in my stomach, the way my heart kept interrupting itself, the fact that my hand kept moving to my abdomen without instruction.I was ten weeks along, roughly. The hospital had estimated. Ten weeks of a secret growing inside me while the marriage around i

Alexandria’s POVI woke up nauseated.Not the gentle kind that eases off if you lie still long enough. The aggressive kind that sits at the back of your throat and dares you to move. I made it to the guest bathroom just in time and spent five minutes on my knees on the cold tile floor, one hand braced against the wall, the other pressed to my mouth even though that was entirely useless.When it passed I sat back against the bathtub and closed my eyes.Ten weeks. The hospital had said ten weeks and apparently week ten had decided to announce itself properly.I ran the tap cold and pressed a wet cloth to the back of my neck and waited for the room to stop tilting. Outside the bathroom window the Vegas morning was doing its usual thing — too bright, too soon, the sun coming up over the desert like it had something to prove. I squinted at it and felt deeply uncharitable toward it.I got up slowly. Rinsed my mouth. Looked at myself in the mirror.I looked terrible. Not elegantly tired like

Alexandria’s POVHe was good for about four hours.I know because I counted. After I told him, he’d been careful and measured and almost gentle in a way that sat uncomfortably on him, like a suit that didn’t quite fit. He’d asked if I was hungry. He’d made sure I had water. He hadn’t pushed for details or made it about himself and I had sat with the strange novelty of it and tried not to read too much into it.Four hours later I was in the guest room when I heard him on the phone.I wasn’t trying to listen. The house had always carried sound in odd ways — something about the high ceilings and the hard floors — and his study was directly above the guest room and his voice when it dropped into that particular register, low and clipped and controlled, traveled through the floor like it was looking for me specifically.I couldn’t hear words. Just tone.And the tone was the one he used when he was building a case.I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor and waited.He came down

Alexandria’s POVHe came home at six.I heard the car in the drive and then the front door and then the particular silence of a man who walks into his own house and immediately knows something has shifted. I was in the kitchen starting dinner actually starting it, not because he’d texted an order but because I was hungry and cooking gave my hands something to do that wasn’t catastrophizing.He appeared in the kitchen doorway and stopped.“You’re cooking,” he said.“I live here,” I said.He came in slowly, set his briefcase on the counter, loosened his tie with one hand the way he always did when he walked through the door, that automatic decompression gesture I’d watched a thousand times. He looked tired. Not the performance of tiredness he sometimes deployed to avoid conversation, actual tired something around his eyes, a flatness in his shoulders.“Sarah came by,” I said.He went still.“After you left.” I kept stirring. “She said she had a file for you.”“I didn’t ask her to bring a

Alexandria’s POVHe went.Thursday morning, nine am, a therapist’s office on the west side of the city that I hadn’t recommended and hadn’t asked about because it needed to be his choice completely or it meant nothing. He told me the night before, mentioned it the way you mention a work appointment — I have something at nine tomorrow — and I’d nodded and not made a thing of it because making a thing of it felt like the wrong move.When he left the house Thursday morning in a jacket but no tie, which was apparently what Jamie Grayson wore to be emotionally vulnerable with a stranger, I stood at the kitchen window and watched the car pull out and felt something I hadn’t expected.Scared.Not of him going. Of hoping. Of the particular dangerous thing that happens when someone you’ve been protecting yourself from starts doing the right things and your defenses develop cracks you didn’t authorize.I knew this feeling. I’d had a version of it at sixteen, watching him take his Gatorade withou