The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 297

AMELIA’S POV: 

The notice board said eleven words and I read them and I thought: good. 

This house believes that rules matter more than feelings. And my immediate, first, completely automatic response was: no they do not and it is not because I had thought about it but because I felt it. Which was already a point in my favour if anyone was paying attention. 

I signed up for the negative before Andrew got there. I knew he would want the affirmative. Andrew believed in rules and systems and structures and proper frameworks the way some people believed in their favourite football team, passionately and with a lot of data to back it up. He was going to argue for the affirmative very well and I was going to have to be better than very well. 

I was going to be excellent. 

I found him later and we established the rules of engagement, which were that we would not share our preparation with each other until the debate itself. This was my idea. I did not want Andrew knowing my arguments in advance because he would build specific rebuttals for all of them and I would spend two weeks watching him do it at the kitchen table, which would be both distracting and slightly annoying. 

I also, if I am being completely honest, did not want him to know that I was less certain about my position than I had appeared when we talked. 

Here is the thing about feelings versus rules. 

I believe feelings matter. I believe them completely. I have always been a person who trusted what she felt, who understood that the body and the heart knew things before the brain caught up, who could read a room by walking into it and sense the emotional temperature before anyone had said a word. Feelings were real and they were important and anyone who dismissed them did not understand how much of human life they organized. 

But I also knew, because I was not silly, that feelings could be wrong. 

I had felt certain things that turned out not to be true. I had felt scared of things that were not dangerous. I had felt angry in moments when the anger was about something completely different from what I thought it was about. And I had watch 

people’s feelings lead them into things that hurt them, not because the feelings were fake b 

ings did not always have access to the full picture. 

est opinion, my real opinion, was more complicated than either side of this debate. 

But debates did not ask for your complicated honest opinion. They asked you to argue a side. And I had signed up for the negative and I was going to argue it as well as it could possibly be argued because I was Amelia Martinez and I did not do things halfway. 

I went to Mum. 

I found her in the kitchen at the island with her sketchbook, which was her late evening thing when the house had gone quiet enough. I sat across from her and she looked up. 

“The debate,” I said. 

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