After Transmigrating, My Husband Is an Octopus novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: What It Does

"That's not possible," I said.

"Isn't it?" Tristram pointed across the harbour with two fingers.

On the far quay stood the baker's stall, with its new awning and its crooked, mended beam.

Bess was at the counter with a basket on her arm.

The baker's son leaned over the loaves toward her, flour to his elbows, and she was laughing so hard she had to hold on to the board.

Between them hung a soft white number.

Eighty-five.

My stomach dropped.

"Last week she asked me to read her and him," I said. "As a joke. I said eighty-five, and she said I was being kind."

"Last week he sold her yesterday's bread and called her Miss Marwood," Tristram said. "She told my cook so, and my cook told me. She called him a stick of dough."

"Now look at them."

Bess saw me across the water and waved the basket over her head.

She was glowing.

"They are not pretending," Tristram said gently. "That is the worst of it. Everything they feel is real. It is only that it was not there until you spoke."

"You can't know that."

"I know Ottoline." His voice did not change. "Nine years I have sat beside her and never once wanted to take her hand."

"You said you did."

"I said she never looked at me." He smiled without humour. "She was thirty percent, Morwenna. I could not have been more courteous or more bored."

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