Sign the Papers Mr. Langford novel Chapter 239

Lawrence suddenly reached out and clamped a hand around her wrist.

His grip wasn't brutally tight, but the motion was jarringly abrupt.

Wren froze completely.

She glanced down at his hand, and when she looked back up, her eyes were practically frozen over.

"Let go."

Lawrence didn't release her immediately.

He couldn't even explain to himself why he had grabbed her in that split second.

Perhaps it was because the guest suite door was only a few steps away.

Perhaps it was because the fleeting image of a perfect family in the living room earlier had felt so identical to the past.

Or perhaps it was because every time she turned her back on him, she did it so decisively—so decisively that it left him feeling like he was the one abandoned in the dust.

"Wren," his voice was dangerously low. "Do you have to act like this all the time?"

"Like what?"

"Like you're guarding yourself against a total stranger."

Wren stared at him.

"Do you honestly think you aren't one right now?"

The words caused a violent, dark shift in Lawrence's eyes.

He took a step forward.

The physical distance between them was instantly obliterated.

Wren could smell the faint scent of cedarwood on him, laced with a hint of tobacco. It was a scent she used to know intimately—so intimately that if he came home late at night, she would know it was him without even turning on the lights.

But right now, that familiarity offered zero comfort.

Instead, a nauseating knot formed in her stomach.

Lawrence saw her brows pull together in disgust.

That microscopic reaction was a sharper blade than any verbal rejection.

"You can't even stand me being near you anymore?"

"No. I can't."

Her answer came entirely too fast.

Without a single microsecond of hesitation.

The knuckles of the hand gripping her wrist tightened imperceptibly.

"We are still married."

Wren's gaze grew even colder.

"And what exactly do you think that sentence entitles you to?"

Lawrence had no answer.

But his silence spoke volumes.

The title of 'husband' had once granted him far too many unspoken privileges.

The privilege of assuming she would always wait for him.

The privilege of assuming she would always yield.

The privilege of assuming she would seamlessly clean up his messes.

The privilege of assuming that even if he returned to the master bedroom in the dead of night without a single word of explanation, she would still leave a light on for him.

Now that she was methodically revoking those privileges one by one, he was finding it impossible to adapt.

He even felt insulted.

She had.

She couldn't lie and say she hadn't.

When Leo was smiling so brightly, she had experienced a single, devastating second of a trance.

In that second, she saw her child sitting on the rug, and she saw Lawrence clumsily nudging a plastic figure forward. The living room had been entirely devoid of screaming matches, devoid of sarcasm, devoid of Eleanor's endless criticism.

It felt as though everything could still be painstakingly glued back together.

But that was only a fragile sliver of light born from a child's desperate yearning.

It was not evidence that a dead marriage had suddenly resurrected.

Wren spoke softly. "Leo needed that second."

Lawrence leaned closer, his breath ghosting against her.

"And you?"

Wren finally turned to look at him.

The dim light above cast an almost ghostly pallor over her face.

"I don't need it."

Lawrence's fingers went completely rigid against the doorframe.

Those four words were infinitely colder than 'I hate you.'

Hatred at least implied an emotional tether.

'I don't need it' was the ultimate severing of ties.

He suddenly dipped his head, moving as if to kiss her.

The motion wasn't violent, but it came with zero warning. It carried a frantic, desperate urgency to confirm, to reclaim, to prove that he could still elicit some kind of physical reaction from her.

Driven by pure instinct, Wren violently jerked her face away.