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Chapter Seventy-Three:
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2026-08-20 21:02:14
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OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Seventy-Three:
The ballroom empties slowly. The same way the gallery emptied on March fourteenth. People leaving in ones and twos, staying at the door, saying the things people say when they have been somewhere that required something of them. Adaeze laughing with James near the anthology table, the laugh arriving before she does, her hands on a copy of the book she has already opened twice tonight. Ruth is sitting quietly with her wine and a woman she met an hour ago who read the letters section and came to find her immediately after.Edmund is at a table near the prints. Three people are around him, talking, and he is listening with the full attention he gives everything, his notebook out but not open, just present on the table beside his glass like a habit he carries everywhere without always using.I move through the room slowly. Not hosting exactly, just present and available. The way you are at something you have built when you want to make sure it is landing the way you made it isMaya is sti
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Seventy-Two:
The launch begins at seven. By six fifty the ballroom is full in the way that matters: not crowded but occupied by people who are entirely present. I stand near the back and watch them arrive and find their tables and pick up the anthology copies and page through them with the attention of people who have been told something true is inside and are already looking for it.Edmund is backstage, which in this context means the small anteroom off the ballroom where Margaret put a chair and a glass of water and left him alone when he asked to be. Sophia checked on him at six forty-five. She came back and stood beside me and said, "He is ready." I said, "How do you know?" She said he was not whispering.I understood immediately.Patrick is at the podium doing a final check on his notes. He is a man who has introduced important work many times and has developed the specific calm of someone who knows that his job is to open the door and then get out of the way. He looks up and finds me across
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Seventy-One:
On the morning of the launch, I wake before everyone.This has become my way with important days. My body does not wait for alarms on days that matter. It simply decides and surfaces, and there I am, awake at five thirty with the specific clarity of someone whose nervous system has been preparing for something and is done waiting.The estate is quiet around me. Alexander is breathing slow and even beside me. The April dark outside the windows, the sound of the water below the cliff, and the specific coastal quality of pre-dawn silence that is different from city silence, fuller somehow, and the ocean doing its continuous work in the background of everything.I get up carefully. Find my sketchbook. I go to the window seat in the bedroom and sit with the dark outside and the estate grounds just visible below, the April garden in the pre-dawn gray, and I draw.Not the launch. Not Edmund or the ballroom or any of what today contains. I draw the view from this window exactly as it is right
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Seventy:
Edmund is still in the chair by the window when I find him.The garden below is doing what April gardens do before they have fully committed. The grass is the tentative green of something recently decided. The flower beds are mostly preparation, dark earth, and the first suggestions of color, a few early blooms that arrived before the others and are standing in the cold like people who showed up too early to a party and are not sorry about it.Edmund has his notebook open on his knee, but he is not writing. He is looking at the garden with the specific attention of a man who has spent forty years noticing what light does to familiar things and has not yet run out of ways to see it.I sit on the edge of the bed across from him.He does not look away from the window. "Your estate is very beautiful," he says."Alexander's estate." "Yours," he says. Simply. The way he says true things. I look at the garden. "In June it will be our wedding garden. Thirty people. Afternoon light." I pause.
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Sixty-Nine:
The anthology goes to print on a Tuesday in late March.Patrick sends a photograph of the final file confirmation at eleven in the morning. A screenshot, the kind that is not beautiful but is exactly right; a document name; a timestamp; and the word *"submitted"* in small green text that means the thing exists now in a form that cannot be taken back.Sophia is at the kitchen counter when it arrives. She looks at the photograph for a long moment. Then she sets her phone down and picks up her coffee and looks at the wall of paintings."It is done," she says. "Yes.""Edmund's poems are in it." "Yes.""Maya's drawings." "Yes.""The sculptor in Detroit. The filmmaker in Portland. The carpenter's daughter in London." She looks at CB on the summer painting. "My mother at the beginning of every section. Just the initials, just the dates." "Yes."She is quiet for a moment. "Patrick said the printer estimates six weeks. Physical copies arrive in mid-May." "Yes. In time for the April launch.""W
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Sixty-Eight:
My father arrives at the gallery on Saturday at noon exactly.I am already inside, near the entrance, when I see him through the glass door. He is standing on the sidewalk looking at the facade of Meridian with the specific quality of someone preparing himself. Not hesitating. Preparing. There is a difference, and I have learned to see it.He comes through the door. He is wearing his good coat. The dark wool one he saves for occasions that matter. I have not seen it since my mother's funeral, a thought I have and set aside immediately because today is not that day. Today is a different kind of occasion."Sophia," he says. "Dad," I look at him. He looks older than the coffee shop in October. Grayer. Something in his face that was not there before, a quality of openness that sits where the careful management used to be. Grief does this sometimes. Or trying does. "Come in."He follows me to the entrance of the spiral. He stops at the sentence on the wall. You make the shape of the thing
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Seven:
"Whoever is doing this has been inside my company for longer than three weeks. I need to know who it is before they know I am looking."Alexander is on a call at six in the morning, standing at the window of his office with the city still grey below him. Marcus Reeves is on the other end. Head of i
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Five:
The cedar and sharp, expensive cologne that has become one of the most familiar things about this penthouse hits her first when she walks into the living room. Tom Ford Oud Wood. He is standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows with his back to her, looking out at the city. When he turns and sees the
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Four:
I cannot sleep. Again. It is becoming a pattern, and I do not know how to break it. Midnight comes, and I am wide awake, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Derek and the gallery and the way Alexander held his hand at my back like he was holding me in place. Like he wanted me there. Not because
OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER Chapter Three:
I wake to sun streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows and have no idea what time it is. I reach for my phone. Ten thirty. I have not slept past eight in years. I sit up and look around the room. My room. In Alexander Kane's penthouse. This is real. This is actually happening.I get out of be
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