The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 237

She Found Me 

HANNAH’S POV: 

I got there at seven fourteen. 

The performance had already started. The woman at the door gave me the expression of someone who had dealt with many parents arriving slightly late and had complicated feelings about it and I whispered sorry and sorry and pointed at the door and she waved me through with the air like someone who had made peace with the state of the world. 

The lights inside were dim because the stage lights were up and I could see the stage clearly from the entrance before I had even found my row. There was a group of children in costumes and in the middle of them, at the front, was Amelia. 

She was in the middle of a line and she was saying something I could not hear yet from this distance but her face was completely alive with it, fully present and fully committed. The way she was when she was doing something she loved and could feel that she was doing it well. Even from across the room I could see it in how she was standing, the particular quality of attention she gave to things when they mattered to her. 

Elijah had seen me come in. He was three rows from the front and he turned just slightly and I found the seat he had kept and I slid into it trying not to disturb the absolute minimum number of people, which based on the looks I received was still approximately four more people than ideal. 

I was still in my meeting clothes. Nice trousers, a structured jacket and I did not care even slightly. 

Elijah leaned over and whispered, “She does not know you are here yet.” 

“That’s very good,” I whispered back. 

I looked at the stage. 

Amelia was in the middle of a scene and she was holding it with complete confidence. She delivered a line and some of the children around her laughed and a few parents in the audience laughed too and she did not break character, not even for a second. 

I pressed my hand over my mouth. 

Then, about four minutes in, there was a moment where Amelia’s character had to look out at the audience. A pause written into the scene where she had to turn and face the front. She turned and she looked out. 

And she found me. 

I do not know how she spotted me so quickly in a dark room full of people. Children’s instinct for their parents, maybe, or just Amelia specifically who had always had eyes that missed very little. She saw me and her whole face changed in one single unguarded second, not breaking character but something underneath the character shifting like a light going on behind glass. 

Just for that second. 

Then she was back in the scene, delivering the next line perfectly, as if nothing had happened. 

But that second was mine. That one unguarded second of recognition and joy that my daughter had not been able to fully contain even in the middle of her own performance was the single best thing that had happened to me all day. All week and eveb possibly longer. 

I reached over in the dark and found Elijah’s hand. 

He squeezed it without looking away from the stage. 

And I sat there in my too-formal meeting clothes in the third row of my daughter’s drama production and I watched her be magnificent because she was up there being magnificent. 

And I had made it. 

Afterward, in the corridor outside with the noise of children and proud parents and the chaos that follows every school performance, Amelia found me and launched herself at me with the full force of post-performance adrenaline, which was considerable. 

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify