The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 261

Stronger Than the Lie 

HANNAH’S POV: 

He was quiet for a moment. “I was angry,” he said, with the calm specificity he always brought to his own feelings. “I did not say anything because I thought if I said something it was going to be something too big for school and I would get itr trouble. So I did not say anything.” A pause. “I did not want to get in trouble. But I also did not like it.” 

“You made a good call,” Elijah said from the driver’s seat. “Being angry and choosing not to act on it in the wrong moment is not weakness either. That is judgment.” 

Andrew considered this seriously. “Okay,” he said, in a very similar tone to the one Amelia had used. 

We did not go home directly. 

We drove to the park first and the children ran around for forty minutes and I sat on a bench with Elijah beside me and neither of us said very much and that was the right call. Children process things through movement. You cannot sit them down and make them talk through something difficult the moment it happens. You give them room and their bodies and you are nearby and they come back when they are ready. 

Amelia came back to the bench first. She sat next to me and leaned against my side and I put my arm around her. 

“Why do people do that?” she asked. “Say things that are not true about someone?” 

I thought about how to answer that honestly in a way that was the right size for her. “Because they are trying to hurt that person,” I said. “Or hurt the people who love them. Or make other people think badly of them so that something the person is doing becomes more difficult.” 

She was quiet for a moment. “Are they trying to stop you from doing something?” 

“Yes,” I said. “There is someone who does not want me to tell a very important story about my mother. Your late grandmother Mirada. And because they cannot stop the story itself they are trying to make people not trust me, so that when the story comes out people might not believe it.” 

“But the story is true,” she said. 

“Yes,” I said. “It is very true.” 

“And you have proof.” 

“Dad said something like that once,” he said. “About a different thing. He said the people who fight hardest against the truth are usually the ones who know the truth is about them.” He was quiet for a moment. “I did not know he was talking about this.” 

“He was not talking about this specific thing when he said it,” I told him. “But yes. It applies here.” 

Andrew nodded slowly. That careful nod. 

“Are you scared, Mummy?” Amelia asked. She said it very directly, in the way she asked things when she really needed to know the answer rather than the reassuring version of it. 

I thought about the morning the article had dropped. About reading it at the kitchen table with Elijah beside me About the particular humiliation of seeing your own past arranged into a shape that does not belong to you. About sitting with all of it and picking up the pencil and going back to the sketch. 

“Yes,” I said. “Sometimes. Not all the time and not in a way that stops me. But yes, sometimes I am scared.” 

She looked at me.