The End of a Marriage (Colette and Matheo) novel Chapter 112

Chapter 112

Chapter 27

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Her voice, when she finally spoke, was quiet, but it cut through the air like a blade. “Fine. I’ll go, Luca… but I’m not taking Nico with me.”

That stopped him cold.

He froze, turning slowly to look at her, the words not making sense. Amber stood there, pale, her eyes dark like he’d never seen before. Or

maybe it was him. Maybe he was the one seeing only darkness. He didn’t know anymore.

“What did you just say?” His voice was low, disbelieving, as if asking the question would unravel the impossibility of what he’d heard.

Amber’s gaze dropped to the floor, her long hair hanging like a curtain over her face. “I’ll leave. I’ll pack my things and go.” Her voice wavered,

her lower lip trembling. “But Nico stays here. With you.”

Luca stared at her, heart pounding, the quiet of the room suddenly suffocating. “What the hell are you talking about?” The words were out before he could stop them, raw with disbelief and a fear that clawed at his chest. Amber–this woman who would fight the world for their son-

was giving him up?

His feet moved before he realized it. He crossed the room and gripped her shoulders, shaking her as gently as he could manage, his breath coming fast. “Amber?!”

“I can’t take Nico back with me,” she whispered, her voice breaking as tears slid down her face, hidden beneath the dark waves of her hair. Luca’s panic spiked. He shook her again, he wanted answers. An he wanted them now. “Why? Why can’t you take him?”

She finally looked up, red–rimmed eyes meeting his with a terrible fragility that cut through him like a knife. “They found stage one breast cancer. I… I have to start chemotherapy in three weeks.”

The words hung in the air between them like a death sentence. Luca’s grip loosened on her shoulders as the ground beneath him seemed to shift, the room tilting, her words sinking in slowly, painfully. Cancer. Amber–strong, defiant Amber–had cancer.

“I’m just preparing for the worst,” she continued, a false steadiness creeping into her voice. “I don’t know how I’ll feel once the treatment starts, or if I’ll be able to take care of Nico. And if things… if things go wrong…” She trailed off, but Luca understood. The possibility of her not making it through. The sheer terror of it.

She swallowed hard, blinking away more tears. “I don’t want Nico to see me like that. Sick, weak… watching me fall apart. A mother who won’t be able to take him to park, take him to school or cook his favourite food. don’t want that for him.” Her voice cracked, and she exhaled shakily, pushing forward. “It’s just for six months. Maybe less. I’ll come back for him. But for now… I need you to take care of him.”

Luca could only stare. His thoughts were a tangled mess–panic, disbelief, anger at fate for doing this. To Nico. To them. But he couldn’t find all began to fall into place. Nico’s outbursts, his heart–wrenching the words, not when his mind kept flashing back to his son’s tearful eyes fear that his mother didn’t love him anymore, his insistence that Amber was planning to leave him behind–it suddenly made sense. Nico hadn’t been wrong. His mother was going to leave him. But not for the reasons Nico had imagined. His poor, dear son.

He still hadn’t processed the shock of Amber’s cancer. The low, relentless hum in his ears drowned out everything else, leaving him fixated on one terrible fact: Amber was sick–very, very sick. This might be the hardest battle she would ever face, and she was going through it alone. Her fragmented, distant family wouldn’t be there for her. The only real family she had was Nico, their son, and now she was sacrificing even that, leaving Nico behind for his own sake.

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09:15 Mon, Feb 9 0 G.

Chapter 112

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