The Rose He Killed novel Chapter 171

Chapter 156: Honeymoon Day Eleven-1

Bella POV

Claim

I did the math properly on day eleven. Dates, cycle, symptoms, timeline. sat on the edge of the bath at six in the morning while Caleb slept, and I did it clearly and completely and looked at the answer without flinching.

The answer was not seafood. The answer was not travel or different water or wedding planning or the body adjusting to anything.

I sat there for a while with it.

The nausea had been there every morning for weeks. The way certain smells started to irritate me. The tiredness that arrived in the afternoons which was so unusual, which I had been attributing to sun and swimming and the general physical activities of a honeymoon.

The way I’d cried in the shower days ago for no reason I could name, which was not something I did, which was not something my body did, not without cause.

There was a cause. I pressed both hands flat on my knees and looked at the bathroom wall and let the full weight of it dawn on me.

I was not going to buy a test today. There was one more day of the honeymoon and I was not going to spend it in a different emotional register than the one we’d been living in for days. We had tonight and tomorrow morning and the boat back and I wanted all of it exactly as it was – Caleb and me and the island and the uncomplicated warmth of a life we’d built.

Tomorrow, I will deal with it. I got up, washed my face, and went to make tea.

Caleb was awake when I came back, sitting up in bed with the look of someone who had been watching the door.

“You were up early,” he said.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I said, handing him a mug.

He took it and looked at me over the rim with those grey eyes that saw things I didn’t always intend to show, and I looked back at him calmly and waited.

“Are you okay?”

“Perfect,” I said. “What do you want to do today?”

“Beach,” he said. “Then I want to try that thing Ruth mentioned with the kayaks.”

“You’ve never kayaked in your life.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“You’re going to fall in.”

“Almost certainly,” he agreed. “You can watch from the shore.”

12

Chapter 156 Honeymoon Day Eleven-1

Claim

Haughed and sat beside him on the bed and he put his arm around me and I leaned into him and we drank our tea looking at the open wall and the sea beyond it, and I thought: one more day, one more day of this exact thing. I was going to be fully present for every second of it.

We kayaked. He fell in twice, which I watched from the kayak beside him because I was absolutely not watching from the shore. The second time he went over I went over laughing at him and we both ended up in the water holding the upturned kayaks and he looked at me treading water beside him with his hair completely wrecked and said “this is your fault” and I said “you capsized independently both times” and he pulled me toward him and kissed me with the sea between us and I stopped caring about the kayaks entirely.

We swam back to shore and lay in the sun and I felt something I didn’t quite have a word for the specific bittersweet of a perfect thing that was almost over, the last day of something you’d lived inside so fully you couldn’t quite believe it was ending.

“I don’t want to go home,” I said, looking at the sky.

“We can stay,” he said.

“We can’t stay.”

“Ruth would accommodate us.”

“Tom would fly here himself and collect us personally,” I said.

Caleb laughed. “True.”

“And the company needs us,”

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