Semua Bab Rejected and Pregnant with Alpha Twins: Bab 101 - Bab 110

~Selene's POV~The east wing has good light.She noticed this three days before Thursday, when Caden offered her the tour and she took it alone without him, which he understood without being told. The south-facing windows pull the afternoon in cleanly, no pines blocking this side of the building, and the rooms are larger than she expected for what this floor was originally built to hold. Larger than necessary for two babies who are still closer to the floor than the ceiling. But the space is workable. The space is exactly right.She starts immediately after breakfast.Mrs. Gale brings tea and stands in the doorway to receive instructions, which is the dynamic they have always had and which Selene is grateful to find intact. She does not have to explain the authority structure of the east wing to anyone. It is simply operative from the moment she opens her mouth. She tells Mrs. Gale what stays, what moves, which room becomes the twins' main space and which becomes Miriam's room for the

~Selene's POV~The kitchen at Blackwell Manor runs east to west along the back of the ground floor, which means by nine in the morning the south-facing windows on the adjacent breakfast room have already done most of their work and the light coming through into the kitchen itself is the secondhand kind, reflected off the garden wall rather than direct. She had forgotten this. At the south property the kitchen window faced the garden straight on, and the mornings there were brighter earlier. Here the kitchen takes its time.She has been awake since Lior announced the morning at six forty-three.She has been through the east wing routine, the twins fed and changed and transferred to the main sitting room where Miriam is reading with them in the particular patient way Miriam does most things, her book open on her knee and Asha working her way methodically through a set of soft blocks on the rug nearby and Lior conducting experiments from his bouncer with the focused determination of some

~Selene's POV~She waits until nine.Not because nine is a significant hour or because she has assigned it any particular weight. She waits because the twins need to be fully down and the house needs to have settled into its evening quiet and she needs to have sat with the direction she found last night long enough to be certain it is a direction and not simply a mood produced by a particular chair and a clear sky and the specific quality of silence in a manor she is still learning to be inside again. She has made decisions from moods before. She knows the difference now between a mood and a direction, and this is a direction, and she waits until nine to be sure.She checks the east wing at eight forty-five.Both twins are down. Asha is deep under, her breathing the slow even rhythm that means genuinely out rather than the lighter sleep she sometimes does in the first hour where any sound from the hallway brings her back up. Lior is on his stomach with his face turned toward the windo

~Selene's POV~The conversation starts the way most of their evenings start now.Miriam goes to bed at half past nine, which is her habit and has been since Silvermere, where late nights did not suit the rhythm of two infants and the particular exhaustion of a woman in her fifties who has been someone's anchor through a year that required more anchoring than most years do. She says goodnight to both of them from the doorway of the main sitting room, where Selene and Caden are at either end of the long sofa with the fire going and two glasses on the low table, and her goodnight carries no commentary, which is itself the commentary. The door closes behind her.The fire is well built at this point. The evening has been going since seven, when Selene came downstairs after the twins' bedtime to find him already in the sitting room with the fire lit and nothing in particular planned, which is the version of an evening she has come to find most reliable. No agenda. No subject arranged in adv

~Selene's POV~She wakes with the clarity already there.This is unusual. Most mornings she surfaces gradually, the first few seconds a neutral space before the day's contents arrive in whatever order they choose to arrive. The twins, the schedule, whatever is sitting unresolved from the night before. The clarity does not usually come first. This morning it does, before she has fully opened her eyes, before she has registered the quality of the light coming under the curtain or the sounds of the manor below her or anything else that confirms she is awake and the night is over.She lies still.The room is cold at the edges the way it always is at this hour, the heating not yet running at full capacity, the stone of the manor holding the night's temperature in the walls and releasing it slowly into the morning. She is warm under the quilt. Outside she can hear the pines, the low sound of them in what must be an early wind, and below that, nothing yet from the east wing, which means Lior