The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 205

HANNAH’S POV:

He replied almost immediately: I will believe that when I physically see it.

I laughed out loud if that big empty warehouse and the sound bounced off the high ceiling and came right back down to me like it did not know where else to go.

I stood back and looked at everything I had drawn. The wall was covered, though not finished or perfect but full of something that was real and alive and mine.

“Okay, Mama,” I said quietly, to nobody standing in that room and to somebody who was not there but who I believed was listening somewhere. “Let us go.”

When I finally got home Elijah was in the kitchen, he wasn’t cooking anything. Just sitting at the island with a glass of water and his phone face down on the counter, which meant he had been sitting there waiting and trying to look like he had not been sitting there waiting.

“It has been two hours,” he said, without looking up.

“It has been one hour and forty-five minutes.”

“That is two hours, Hannah.”

“That is technically less than two hours, Elijah.”

He looked up at me then and I could see him fighting the smile. He lost. “The wall?” he asked.

“Covered,” I said. I sat down across from him at the island and stole a sip of his water because I was suddenly very thirsty and also because I simply could. He watched me do it with the patience of a man who had long since accepted that his water was also my water.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

I thought about it honestly instead of just giving him the automatic fine. “Like someone lit a fire under me,” I said. “Which I realize is not the most sensitive metaphor right now given everything, but it is genuinely how I feel.

He looked at me for a moment and then he laughed. “Only you,” he said.

“Only me,” I agreed.

They were both asleep. Andrew on his back with one arm thrown over his face the way he had been sleeping since he was a baby. Amelia curled on her side with her hand tucked under her cheek, her hair spread out across the pillow in a way that was going to be an absolute situation to deal with in the morning.

I stood there and just looked at them for a while.

They did not know about any of it. Not the full story or about the archive or the photographs or the detective or the car on the CCTV footage. They knew the building had burned and that it had made me sad and that we were working hard to fix things, which was enough for now. Children know more than you think they do but they also know how to let you carry what needs to be carried as long as you do not pretend you are not carrying it.

Andrew stirred slightly and I thought for a second he was going to wake up, but he just turned his head and went still again.

“Thirty days,” I whispered to them in the dark, knowing they could not hear me. “And then you can watch Mummy show everyone exactly what this family is made of.”

I pulled their door back to its proper crack and went to bed.

And for the first time in several days I fell asleep before my thoughts could catch me.