The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 260

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HANNAH’S POV:

Mrs. Obama was standing at the school gate when we arrived and she had an expression I did not immediately understand. She taught Amelia’s class and she was a patient and warm person and the expression on her face was careful in a way that suggested she had something to say that she had been waiting to say.

She came to me directly. “Mrs. Martinez,” she said. “I wanted to speak with you before you took the children home today. There was a small incident at lunch.”

My stomach did the thing stomachs do. “What kind of incident?”

“Some children had been looking at something on a phone that belonged to an older sibling,” she said. “It was taken away immediately and we addressed it with the children involved. But Amelia was upset by something that was said and Andrew was. Well. Andrew was Andrew about it, which is to say he was quite controlled but I could tell he was not comfortable.”

I looked at Elijah beside me. His face was very still.

“Thank you for telling me,” I said to Mrs. Okafor. “We will talk to them at home.”

She nodded. “They are both fine,” she said. “I just wanted you to know.”

On the way to the school Elijah and I did not talk much. He drove and I sat in the passenger seat looking out the window and thinking about what Mrs. Obama had said and what it meant for two children who had not asked to be caught up in any of this.

The hardest thing about being a parent when your life becomes complicated is that your children do not get to choose whether the complications land on them. They are just there. In the middle of your life. And the things that happen to you happen around them and sometimes at them and you can protect them from some of it and you cannot protect them from all of it and the gap between those two things is where most of the difficult moments live.

Andrew and Amelia had not asked for a mother whose name was in the news. They had not asked for a grandmother who had been robbed of her name. They had not asked for any of the weight of this particular story. But they were in it because I was in it and I was going to have to find a way to make sure the truth of what it meant reached them in a form they could carry.