Chapter 158
Chapter 158
Mia
Ethan was already at my apartment when I returned, having picked up the twins from Rosa's care earlier in the afternoon. The scene that greeted me when I opened the door stopped me in the threshold, something warm and aching expanding in my chest.
He sat on the living room floor, Lily in his lap, Leo beside him, surrounded by the wreckage of what appeared to have been an ambitious block tower. Lily was systematically dismantling the remaining structure while Leo watched with the philosophical resignation of a man who had learned to accept forces beyond his control.
"We had a castle," Ethan said without looking up, his voice carrying the particular exhaustion of someone who had been negotiating with toddlers for several hours. "It was magnificent. A true architectural achievement. And then someone—" he bounced Lily gently, eliciting a delighted shriek, "—decided she preferred chaos to civilization."
"She gets that from your side of the family," I said, dropping my bag by the door and crossing to join them on the floor.
"The Wentworths are paragons of order and restraint."
"The Wentworths are agents of chaos who hire enough staff to clean up after them." I kissed Leo's head, then Lily's, and finally—after a moment's hesitation that was becoming shorter with each passing day—Ethan's cheek.
He caught my hand before I could pull away, pressing his lips to my palm in a gesture so tender it made my breath catch.
"How was Anne?" he asked, his eyes meeting mine over our daughter's head.
"Good. Concerned. Suspicious of your sudden transformation into a functional human being."
"Reasonable." His smile was crooked, self-deprecating. "I'm suspicious of it too, sometimes."
"What do you mean?"
He shrugged, but something flickered across his face—that shadow I kept catching glimpses of, the one that vanished before I could properly examine it. "Just that I spent so long being... absent. Even when I was here. It still surprises me, how much I missed by not paying attention."
"But you're paying attention now."
"I'm trying." He lifted Lily and stood in a single smooth motion, settling her against his hip. "I'm trying to do all the things I should have been doing from the beginning."
There was an odd weight to his words. A finality that didn't quite match the casual domesticity of the moment. I watched him carry Lily toward the kitchen, Leo toddling after them, and tried to identify what exactly felt off about the exchange.
But then Lily demanded attention and Leo needed his diaper changed and dinner had to be negotiated and the ordinary chaos of parenthood swallowed whatever shadow had been lurking at the edges of our conversation.
Later, after the twins were asleep and we sat together on my small couch, his arm around my shoulders and some forgettable movie playing on the television, I noticed him press his fingers to his temple with a barely suppressed wince.
"Headache?" I asked.
"Hmm? Oh—just tension. Quarterly reviews are brutal this year."
"You should take something. I have ibuprofen in the—"
"I'm fine." He pulled me closer, pressing a kiss to my hair. "Just need sleep. And possibly a vacation."
"After the exhibition," I promised. "We could take the twins somewhere warm. Let them experience sand for the first time."
"Leo would try to eat it."
"Leo tries to eat everything. That's his process."
He laughed, and the sound was so genuine, so free of the careful control that had characterized him for most of our marriage, that I felt my remaining doubts dissolve like morning fog.
Anne was wrong. There was no hidden reason for his transformation, no secret catalyst, no looming revelation. He had simply, finally, grown into the man he should have been all along. And I was going to stop questioning it and start enjoying it.
We're fine, I told myself as I settled deeper into his embrace, listening to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat against my ear. We're finally, finally fine.
Nine days until my exhibition opened in New York.
I had no idea that everything was about to fall apart.
---
Ethan
The email from the Hirslanden Clinic arrived at 6:47 in the morning. The house was silent around me—Rosa not yet stirring in her quarters, the twins still deep in their predawn sleep, the vast emptiness of rooms that had never felt particularly like home pressing in from all sides. I read the message three times in the pale gray light of my study, each word landing with the precision of a surgical instrument.
Dear Mr. Wentworth,
Following our preliminary consultation, we are pleased to confirm that Dr. Heinrich Müller has reviewed your medical records and imaging studies. He concurs with your domestic physicians that surgical intervention is indicated, though he notes several factors that may complicate the procedure...
I stopped reading. The clinical language was almost soothing in its detachment—indicated, complicate, intervention—as if we were discussing a business acquisition rather than the removal of something growing inside my skull.
Surgical intervention is indicated.
Such a clean phrase for such a brutal reality.
I closed the email and opened a new browser tab, pulling up the document I had been working on for the past three days. It was saved under an innocuous title—Q4 Asset Restructuring—but its contents had nothing to do with quarterly reports.
The trust modifications were nearly complete. I had spent the better part of three sleepless nights ensuring that Mia and the children would never want for anything—education funds, property access, living allowances that would continue regardless of her marital status. The language was deliberately neutral, the kind of routine estate planning that any responsible person might undertake. Nothing that would raise suspicion if she ever looked at the documents. Nothing that suggested contingency or countdown.
Just a husband getting his affairs in order, I told myself. Nothing more.
But beneath the legal jargon and financial projections lay something far simpler: a desperate attempt to be useful to her even after I was gone. To protect her in the only way I knew how. To ensure that my absence—whenever it came, however it came—would not leave her scrambling for stability the way she had been forced to scramble after her parents' deaths.
She had already survived too much. I would not add to that burden.