The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 285

Data and Dialogue 

HANNAH’S POV: 

She had chosen her piece within forty-eight hours of the letter arriving. It was an original monologue she had written herself, which I found out after she had already written the first draft and read it to me one evening sitting on the end of my bed, very upright, with the paper held in both hands. 

It was about a girl who discovers that her grandmother was a dancer before she was a wife or a mother or a grandmother, and who learns through finding an old photograph that the people who love us were once strangers to us, were once young and full of things we will never fully know. 

I sat on the edge of my bed and listened and by the end I was pressing my fingers to my lips and Amelia looked at me and said, “Is it too sad?” 

“It is not sad at all,” I said. “It is true. True things feel a certain way and you have written something true.”/ 

She considered this seriously. “I was thinking about Grandma Mirada,” she said. “When I wrote it. I was thinking about how we only know her from the photographs and what Aunty Adele tells us and she was a whole person with a whole life and I will never know most of it.” 

I was very quiet for a moment. 

“You have turned that into something beautiful,” I said. 

“I hope so,” she said. “I want her to be proud.” 

I reached out and held her face in my hands the way Adele had done to me that first day. “She would be,” I said. ” She absolutely would be.” 

“Because I leaned in every time,” I said. 

She filed this. “Okay,” she said, and went back to the room. 

Meanwhile, Andrew and Elijah had their own rituals. I sometimes heard them in the study, Andrew presenting sections of his project and Elijah asking questions, and the quality of the exchange was the equal-footing quality that I had noticed developing between them. Elijah did not talk down to Andrew or over-simplify. Andrew did not soften his explanations for his father. They just spoke to each other as two people who were both interested in the same thing, which was the truth of something. 

One evening I heard father abd son talking. Andrew was explaining why his control group mattered. Elijah was asking about sample size. Andrew was responding with complete certainty and then catching his own assumption and revising it mid-sentence: And Elijah was listening with the full quality of attention he brought to things he respected. 

I shook my head and didn’t disturb them, some moments were just for the people having them.