The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 272

Inheritance of Truth 

LUCAS’S POV: 

Dorothy caught my eye over his head and I saw the corner of her mouth move. 

Martin sat down next to Sam at the table and Sam, without looking up from the colouring book, shifted his chair approximately two centimetres closer to Martin. Such a small movement. 

I sat down across from them. 

“What are you colouring?” I asked. 

Sam looked up. “A lion,” he said. “I am making it orange because real lions are not orange enough.” 

I thought about Kate at the warehouse giving Sam an orange fabric offcut. I thought about how this boy had opinions about the right amount of orange and communicated them without apology. 

“I think that is an excellent decision,” I said. 

He looked at me carefully. Then he pushed the box of crayons across the table toward me. “You can help,” he said. “But not with the lion. I am doing the lion. You can do the background.” 

“What colour should the background be?” I asked. 

He thought about it very seriously. “Your choice,” he said. “But choose well.” 

Martin was looking at the table and trying extremely hard not to smile and failing at it. 

I picked up a crayon. 

“Okay,” I said. “I will do my best.” 

“Good,” Sam said, and went back to the lion. 

Lunch was long and easy and full of the good warmth that comes from a table where people are genuinely glad to be together. Dorothy fed us well and asked me all questions and listened to the answers with the focused attention of someone who was assessing without making you feel assessed. By the time we were done eating I understood completely why Martin had been coming here over the years. Dorothy Osei was the type of person who made you feel like whatever you brought into her house was welcome and whatever you needed to say could be said. 

Sam fell asleep on the sofa after lunch in the way of small children who go from full energy to completely unconscious in about four minutes. 

HANNAH’S POV: 

The legal filing went public on a Tuesday morning. 

I did not plan the day around it. That was something Castellan had advised me about weeks before it happened. She said, and I am remembering her exact words because the delivery was very dry and very her: do not make the filing day a big event in your personal calendar. Do not sit by the screen waiting for the reaction. File it, let it go, and trust the work we have done. She said the work was solid and that solid work did not require you to hold its hand through its first day in the world. 

I had tried to follow this advice. 

The night before the filing I had not slept well. Altjough not in a frightened way. More like the night before anything that has been a long time coming and is finally happening and your body cannot quite settle because it keeps recognizing that tomorrow is significant. I had lain awake for a while and thought about Castellan’s voice on the phone when she had called to confirm everything was in order. I thought about the folder, which was not in our house anymore but in a temperature-controlled storage facility that Castellan’s team used for exactly this type of document. I had let it go there. It had been hard. The folder felt like something I should be holding onto but Castellan had been very firm about chain of custody and she was right and I had agreed and I had still stood in the entrance of the facility afterward and felt the absence of it in a way I had not expected. 

The folder had found its purpose. That was the thing I kept coming back to at two in the morning when sleep would not come. My mother had kept it believing someone would need it. Now the right people had it and they were doing the right thing with it. That was everything she had hoped for. That was everything. 

Elijah had been awake too. He did not say anything. He just reached over in the dark and squeezed my hand once and then let go and eventually I slept. 

I mostly managed it until about ten in the morning, at which point I was in the warehouse reviewing the new spring pieces with Lily and Sandra, and my phone buzzed with a message from Lucas that said simply: IT IS OUT and then a string of punctuation that I chose to interpret as excitement.