The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 220

The Call at Midnight 

HANNAH’S POV: 

On the way home I watched the city through the car window and thought about Frerus. About the seven years I had spent there. About the apartment I had brought the twins home to, the one with the bathroom door that stuck in wet weather and the kitchen window that had a view of someone else’s garden that I had never been able to find out who owned. About the first time I walked into a fabric store there with maybe forty dollars in my pocket and left with two meters of beautiful dark blue cotton that I could not actually afford and carried home like it was treasure because in my mind it was. About the women I had known there.

The people who had been kind. The few who had not been. 

Somebody from that life had followed me here. 

That thought sat in the car with us all the way home and I held it carefully the way you hold something heavy when you are not sure what to do with it yet. 

Not tonight though. Tonight I was going to go home and check on my children and sleep next to my husband and let myself have one evening that was not entirely about this. 

Tomorrow there were seventeen days left and I was going to get back to work. 

I was almost asleep that night when my phone buzzed on the nightstand. 

I picked it up with my eyes half closed expecting it to be a message from Lucas or an email from a supplier and looked at the screen. 

It was a call. From a number 1 recognized but had not seen light up my screen in several months. 

“Aunty,” I said carefully. “What things?” 

There was a pause on the line, small and heavy. 

“I think what is happening to you right now,” she said. “The fire and the collection. I think it is connected, Hannah. I think it is all connected to your mother and to something that happened a very long time ago and I should have warned you and I am so sorry that I did not.” 

I stood in the hallway in the dark with my hand against the wall and my heart beating faster than it had all week and I said, “Tell me everything, Aunty. Start from the beginning.” 

And she took a breath and she began.