Chapter 146

Anna POV

The sound of the door clicking shut behind Edward felt louder than it should have been, echoing through the sudden emptiness of my apartment like the final note of a song I wasn't ready to end. I stood there with my hand still resting on the doorknob, my palm warm against the cool metal, listening to his footsteps fade down the hallway with a kind of acute awareness that made my chest feel tight.

Each diminishing sound seemed to pull something from inside me, some fragile thing I hadn't known I was holding onto until it started slipping away.

When the elevator chimed distantly and I could no longer hear any trace of him, I finally turned back toward the apartment, and the contrast hit me like walking from daylight into shadow.

Just minutes ago, this space had felt alive—charged with his presence, with the warmth of shared conversation and the comfortable rhythm of two people moving around each other with surprising ease. Now the silence pressed in from all sides, heavy and particular in the way that only follows someone's departure. The couch cushions still held the impression of where he'd sat, slightly compressed on the left side where he'd leaned forward while we talked.

In the kitchen, the faint aroma of garlic and ginger still hung in the air, mingling with the clean scent of dish soap from the plates he'd insisted on washing, now stacked neatly beside the sink in a way that was somehow both meticulous and endearing. Even the air itself seemed to retain some ghost of his body heat, as if the apartment was slowly exhaling him out of the space he'd occupied.

I moved to the couch and sank down into it, pulling my knees up and wrapping my arms around them, trying to contain the strange ache that had settled beneath my ribs. My mind kept circling back through the day like fingers worrying at a loose thread, pulling up moments I wanted to examine more closely but was also afraid to touch too directly.

This morning at Helen's facility, the way Edward had sat beside me in that awful waiting room with its institutional chairs and fluorescent lights, his hand covering mine with a firmness that felt like an anchor rather than a restraint. The supermarket with its too-bright aisles and muzak soundtrack, him following me through the produce section with genuine curiosity in his eyes as I explained the difference between napa cabbage and bok choy, his careful attention to my instructions making something warm unfurl in my chest even as I tried to keep my voice casual and instructive.

The kitchen earlier, him standing at my sink with his sleeves rolled up and his hair slightly disheveled, washing vegetables with the kind of focused concentration he probably usually reserved for board meetings, asking questions about garlic preparation like it was genuinely important to get it right.

And dinner—God, dinner. The way he'd looked at me across my small, secondhand table, his expression unguarded in a way I'd almost never seen during our marriage, like he was trying to memorize something he was afraid of forgetting. The way he'd eaten the food I'd made with what seemed like real appreciation, not the polite acknowledgment of someone going through motions but genuine pleasure, genuine gratitude. The way he'd asked, almost shyly, if we could do this again, if he could learn to cook with me, his voice carrying an uncertainty that made him seem younger and more vulnerable than I'd ever known him to be.

The memories played through my head like scenes from someone else's life, and I couldn't quite reconcile them with the Edward I thought I knew—the cold, distant man who'd barely looked at me during our marriage, who'd treated our dinner table like another boardroom and our bedroom like a transaction he needed to complete.

This Edward, the one who'd spent hours with me today doing ordinary, domestic things with what seemed like genuine contentment, felt almost like an imposter. Except I'd seen the truth in his eyes when he looked at me, heard it in his voice when he'd said there was nowhere else he'd rather be. And that truth terrified me more than any of his past cruelty ever had, because it made me want things I'd long since trained myself not to want.

I pressed my face against my knees, feeling heat creep up my neck as my thoughts drifted somewhere they shouldn't go—to that moment just before he'd left, when he'd kissed me by the kitchen counter. The way his hands had framed my face so carefully, like I was something precious he was afraid of breaking. The way the kiss had started soft and questioning but deepened into something that felt like a promise, like a beginning rather than an ending.

And beneath all of it, the treacherous whisper in the back of my mind asking what would have happened if I'd been braver, if I'd asked him to stay, if I'd pulled him toward my bedroom instead of toward the door.

My face burned hotter and I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to banish the images that threatened to form—Edward in my bed, Edward's hands on my skin, Edward looking at me in the darkness with that same unguarded expression he'd worn across the dinner table. It was ridiculous, dangerous, pathetic even, to let myself imagine such things. We weren't together. We'd tried being together and it had been a disaster of epic proportions.

The fact that he could be kind for one day, that he could help me cook dinner and wash dishes and kiss me like he meant it, didn't erase months of coldness and years of damage. Didn't make him safe. Didn't make this real.

But God, I wanted it to be real. The admission rose up in me with startling clarity, cutting through all my careful rationalizations and self-protective instincts. I wanted more days like today. I wanted more evenings in this kitchen with him asking earnest questions about cooking techniques. I wanted more of his rare, genuine smiles, the ones that transformed his usually stern face into something almost boyish. I wanted to believe that the man who'd held my hand in Helen's room and learned to julienne ginger in my kitchen was the real Edward, and the cold stranger from our marriage had been the mask.

The thought should have made me angry at myself—at my own weakness, my inability to maintain proper boundaries, my willingness to be taken in by a few hours of kindness after everything he'd put me through. But lying there on my couch in the gathering dusk, surrounded by the lingering traces of his presence, I couldn't quite muster the anger. There was only this aching want, this treacherous hope that maybe, just maybe, things could actually be different this time.

I forced myself to stand up, needing movement to break the cycle of my thoughts. A shower—I needed a shower, needed to wash away the day and clear my head, needed cold water to shock some sense back into my overheated imagination. I stripped off my clothes mechanically, turned the tap to cool, and stepped under the spray with something like relief. The water sluiced over my heated skin, and I stood there with my eyes closed, trying to let it wash away the dangerous softness that had crept into my defenses.

But even under the water, I couldn't stop thinking about him. Couldn't stop replaying the careful way he'd touched me, the vulnerability in his voice when he'd asked to stay in my life, the warmth in his eyes when he'd looked at me across the table. Couldn't stop wondering what it would feel like to let myself trust that warmth, to believe in it, to reach for what I wanted instead of protecting myself from what I feared.