LOGINBrooklyn's POVMy legs were not entirely reliable on the way to the study.I walked steadily enough that nothing showed — or I hoped nothing showed — but the steadiness was the deliberate kind, the kind you manufacture when everything underneath is doing something unreliable. One foot then the other. Down the hallway. Through the door Patrick held open and stood aside for me to pass through.I went in.The study looked different in the morning than it had the night I had stood outside it listening to the sound of Patrick's hand connecting with Emerson's face. Morning light through the window made it more ordinary. Just a room with a desk and shelves and a safe that now sat properly closed, and a man lowering himself into the chair on the other side of it with the unhurried movements of someone who had decided how this conversation was going to go before it started.I sat in the chair across from him.The same chair. The same desk. The same window.Patrick did not open immediately. He
Brooklyn's POVI couldn't stay inside.I took my tea to the back garden and stood near the far end of it where the morning was quiet and the house was behind me and I could breathe without listening for footsteps.It didn't work.I came back in after ten minutes and went to the kitchen and wiped down surfaces that didn't need wiping and reorganised the fruit bowl and stood at the window looking at the driveway where Patrick's car sat exactly where his driver had parked it last night.Daisy found me at the twenty minute mark.She appeared in the kitchen in her pyjamas with her hair still pressed flat from sleep, took one look at my face, and pulled on my sleeve."Why is everyone upset?" she said.The question was simple and direct in the way Daisy's questions always were — no buffer, no softening, just the thing she had noticed and wanted explained.I looked at her."Nobody's upset," I said. "It's just a grown-up morning." I turned from the window and opened the bread bin. "Have you ea
Brooklyn's POVPatrick looked at the folder in Emerson's hands.Then at his son's face."Why," he said.One word. Quiet and absolute in the way Patrick's single words always were.Emerson held his gaze. "I needed to see what I was agreeing to.""You've been told what you're agreeing to.""I've been told a version of it." Emerson kept his voice level. "What's in that folder is the actual version. The terms. The specifics." He paused. "I wanted to read them before anyone asked me to sign anything."Patrick's eyes moved briefly to me.I kept my face still.Then to Riley.Riley was looking at the folder with an expression I could not fully read from where I was standing — something tightly managed, something that had gone very controlled very quickly when Emerson appeared in the doorway holding it."You broke into my safe," Patrick said."I know the combination," Emerson said."Because I trusted you with it." Patrick's voice didn't rise. That was the thing about Patrick — the anger never
Brooklyn's POVRiley looked at me.I looked at Riley.The look lasted half a second and communicated clearly — neither of us had touched anything.Patrick was already moving.We followed him down the hallway toward the study without being asked, the way people follow a situation they didn't cause but are now part of regardless. Patrick pushed the study door open and went in and we stopped in the doorway behind him.The room was not destroyed.That was the first thing. It wasn't ransacked or thrown about the way you imagined when someone said papers scattered. It was more precise than that — the kind of disruption that comes from someone looking for something specific rather than taking everything available. Papers on the desk had been moved and not replaced carefully enough. The safe on the shelf behind the desk was closed but not latched, sitting slightly open the way a door sits when it hasn't been pulled fully shut.Patrick crossed to it immediately.He looked inside. His eyes move
Brooklyn's POVMy hands went cold around the mug."Riley — ""I'm not interested in the explanation." She set her cup down again, precise and final. "I've heard enough explanations. I've sat through enough dinners and conversations and arrangements and I've watched Emerson look at you across rooms for weeks and I've been very patient about all of it." She held my gaze directly. "What I'm interested in now is practical."I looked at her."My silence about last night," she said. "About what I saw from the window. About Jordan and the photograph and all of it." She kept her voice even and low. "That has a price.""What price.""You help me end this." She said it simply. "Once and for all. Not behind doors, not in private promises that last forty-eight hours before he's back at your door." She held my gaze. "I need Emerson to step back publicly. Convincingly. In a way that leaves no room for anyone — including you — to think there's something still there worth pursuing."I looked at her.
Brooklyn's POVI did not sleep.I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and ran through the same sequence of thoughts in the same order until they stopped feeling like thoughts and started feeling like weather — something happening to me rather than something I was doing.Jordan's face at the gate. The photograph glowing on his screen. His voice when it cracked between fury and heartbreak, the two of them fighting for the same space.Patrick's car coming through the gate.First thing in the morning.The wedding.I turned over at two. Then at three. At four I gave up and lay on my back and stared at the ceiling properly, without pretending I was going to sleep, and did the arithmetic instead.Patrick was home. Riley was here. Jordan had given me until tomorrow which was now today. Emerson had told his father a version of last night that would hold until someone told a different one. And somewhere in the middle of all of it I still had a job I could not afford to lose and a decision
Brooklyn's pov "I'm really sorry, Mr. Weston. I can't work for you."The words came out before I could stop them. Patrick turned from the hallway and looked at me slowly, the way someone does when they're deciding how serious you are."Brooklyn." His voice was calm. "You are contracted through th
Brooklyn's pov "Move!"Emerson shoved past me before I could even process what was happening. He threw himself over Daisy and me, arms spread wide, taking the full weight of the branch across his back.The crack was loud. Then silence.I scrambled to my feet, heart hammering. "Emerson — ""I'm fin
Brooklyn's pov"Teacher f***er."I heard it the second I walked through the doors of Westfield Academy. Nobody said it to my face. They never did. Just loud enough for me to catch it, quiet enough for them to deny it.I kept walking.Two weeks. That's how long this rumour had been following me arou
Brooklyn's pov "Here is the deal." Emerson leaned against the hallway wall, arms crossed, voice low enough that Daisy couldn't hear from the dining room. He looked completely relaxed, like he negotiated truces every morning before breakfast. "I stay out of your way," he said, "so you're free to







