The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 350

Against Alistair Vane 

MARY’S POV: 

She turned and walked back toward her room, her bare feet padding softly against the hardwood. Her shoulders were slumped, just slightly, the way they always were when she was trying to be brave. 

I watched her go, and I felt something inside me harden. 

Not anger or sadness but it was something colder that was becoming more permanent. 

That night, I didn’t sleep. 

I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling, counting nothing in particular. The house was quiet around me, the type of quiet that only came after midnight, when the world had finally stopped moving. Somewhere down the hall, Elowen was asleep, her small body curled around her stuffed rabbit, dreaming of a father who might show up for once. 

I thought about the parent-child event. About Elowen’s face when I told her I would try. About the way she had nodded, accepting the lie before I had even finished telling it. 

She knew. 

Somehow, impossibly, she knew that her father wasn’t coming. She knew it the same way she knew the sound of his footsteps, the way she knew his absence in every room he had ever walked through. 

I thought about the last time I had seen Alistair. 

It had been the night I locked him out of the house. The night I had watched his face through the frosted glass, his fist pounding against the wood, his voice hoarse and furious. I had stood there, on the other side of the door, and I had felt nothing. 

No anger or any sadness just nothing. 

At art galleries, their heads bent together over a painting. At charity galas, her hand in his, her gown trailing behind her like a river of gold. At private dinners, their glasses raised in a toast, their smiles easy and intimate, as if they had been doing this their whole lives. 

The images were everywhere. 

I couldn’t escape them. They appeared on my feed, in my notifications, in the recommended posts that popped up every time I opened my phone. I scrolled past them, blocked the accounts, reported the photos—but they kept coming. Kept finding me. Kept reminding me of what I had lost. 

Or what I had never really had. 

The most galling part was the hypocrisy. Despite flaunting his new relationship so publicly, despite plastering his face across the internet with Vesper at his side, he had never responded to the divorce papers I had sent him. 

Not once.