The Unwanted Wife's Return (Ex-Husband Wants Me Back) novel Chapter 298

AMELIA’S POV: 

I then practiced the argument three times in front of my mirror, which I know sounds like the most dramatic possible thing to do but mirrors do not lie about whether you are convincing and I needed to know if I was convincing. The first rufr through was too much in my head. I was thinking about the logic while I was saying it and the thinking showed. The second run-through was better. The third one felt right. 

Mum came past my room on the third run-through and stood in the doorway for a moment without saying anything and I did not stop because stopping breaks the momentum. When I finished she said, “The ending is right. The middle needs to be slower.” I said I knew. She said, “Then make it slower.” I said I would. She left. 

Becca came over one afternoon for a practice session and argued the affirmative against me, which she had been briefed to do, and she was a good enough debater to push me in the right places. There was one point she made that I did not have an immediate answer for, about the consistency of rules protecting people from each other’s worst impulses, and I took note of it and thought about it for two days before I had the right response. 

I also, in the private parts of my preparation that I did not tell anyone about, wrote out what I thought Andrew was going to argue. I know this sounds like cheating but it was not, it was research. I knew my twin brother. I knew how he thought. I could anticipate his structure and his strongest points with a reasonable degree of accuracy. So I built counter-arguments for those points and I drilled them until I could access them quickly. 

I was not going in unprepared. 

The week before the debate I thought about Andrew. I thought about the fact that he genuinely believed rules mattered more than feelings and it is not because he was cold or unfeeling but because Andrew had feelings, he just processed them differently than I did. He believed in systems because he understood how much protection they provided. He believed in structure because he knew what the absence of it looked like. He was going to argue his position with the full force of a person who actually held it and I was going to have to beat that. 

I was not entirely sure I could. 

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