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Chapter Ten:

作者: Pearl Charles
last update 公開日: 2026-06-19 18:18:30

"You do not have to tell me tonight. But I need you to know I am not going anywhere while you decide."

Sophia says this after Alexander tells her he needs to decide if he is ready to tell her about South Chicago. They are still in the smaller library. The afternoon light has shifted to early-evening grey. The city outside the windows is starting to light up building by building, the way it does every night at this hour. She is sitting on the couch with her sketchbook closed in her lap. He is in
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  • OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER   Chapter Sixty-Two:

    February moves differently than the months before it.There is a quality to the penthouse in February that I have not noticed in the six years I have owned it. Something to do with the light, which is still winter but with a different angle to it, arriving lower through the floor-to-ceiling windows and lying across the floors in long pale strips that were not there in December. Or maybe the light has always done this, and I was not paying attention because there was nobody here whose attention to light had taught me to notice it.Sophia notices everything the light does. I have learned to notice her noticing. She is at the kitchen counter on a Tuesday morning with her coffee and her phone and the specific, focused quality she has when something is assembling itself in her mind before she has language for it yet. I have learned to recognize this state and leave it alone until she surfaces from it. I make my coffee. Read the Kane Global brief open on my laptop. Give her the room.After

  • OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER   Chapter Sixty-One:

    Maya's photographs arrive on a Monday morning.Twelve of them. Attached to an email that is three sentences long is the careful brevity of someone who has decided to be brave and is not going to dilute it with unnecessary words. These are the ones I think are the most true. I don't know if they are good. I know they are honest. I open the attachments one at a time.The face is a woman's. Young, maybe thirty, maybe ageless—it is hard to say because Maya has not drawn her with the specificity of portraiture but with the specificity of someone drawing a feeling in the shape of a face. The eyes change across the twelve drawings. Not the structure of them; the actual eyes stay consistent, the same placement, and the same proportion, but what is in them shifts across the series the way light shifts across seventeen paintings of the same oak tree.In the first drawing the eyes are closed. In the last drawing, the eyes are open and looking directly out of the page. Between them, ten drawings

  • OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER   Chapter Sixty:

    The fourteenth piece changes something in the penthouse.I notice it the day after Sophia finishes it. The drawing is on her desk, not yet photographed properly for Clara's records, not yet matted or prepared for installation, just sitting there in the early light, and I find myself standing in her doorway looking at it for longer than I intend to. The woman in the window looking out and finding herself reflected back. The lamp. The desk. The fifteen paintings in the background."Home," I said. She is home.I meant it about the woman in the drawing. I also meant it about Sophia. I also meant it about myself, which is the part I am still getting used to. The specific unfamiliar weight of a place feeling like home. I have owned this penthouse for six years. I have slept here, worked here, and conducted business from every room. I have never once, before this year, walked through the door at the end of a day and felt the particular settling of a person returning to the right place.I fee

  • OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER   Chapter Fifty-Nine:

    The sanctions ruling comes on a Friday.I am in my room working on the catalog text when Marcus calls Alexander. I hear the call from the hallway, the low register that means something has moved, and I put my charcoal down and wait.Alexander appears in my doorway two minutes later."Sanctions granted," he says.I still go. "Against Derek's legal team." "Yes. Formal censure. Financial penalty. The ruling cites deliberate procedural misuse." He pauses. "The judge used the phrase 'chilling effect on charitable communication' verbatim from Priya's argument. He put it in the written ruling."I look at my desk. In the catalog text, four pages, the words I have been choosing carefully all morning to describe what the window series is and what it costs."Derek's lawyers are going to drop him," I say."Already have. Walsh filed a withdrawal of representation this morning. The censure is a mark against the firm. They cannot afford to keep a client who produces that outcome." "So he has no repr

  • OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER   Chapter Fifty-Eight:

    The hearing is at nine.We are in the car at seven forty-five. Sophia is in a dark coat, hair up, with the specific composed quality she brings to things that require her full self. She has her phone in her lap, and she is not looking at it. She is looking out the window at the city moving past, early-morning Manhattan doing what it does, urgent and indifferent simultaneously.Marcus is already at the courthouse when we arrive. He is standing outside with two members of the litigation team, a woman named Priya, who argues and files federal motions with the focused precision of someone who finds procedural combat genuinely pleasurable, and a younger man named Cole, whose job today is to carry documents and notice everything.Priya shakes Sophia's hand. "We are in good shape," she says. Not reassurance. Assessment."Walk me through the sequence again," Sophia says.Priya does. Standing on the courthouse steps in the December cold, she walks through every step of the morning's argument i

  • OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER   Chapter Fifty-Seven:

    Wednesday is the day before Thursday, and I spend it reading.Not the litigation files. I finished those Tuesday night, every page, every footnote, until I understood the argument as well as anyone who did not go to law school could understand it. I know what Marcus is filing. I know what Derek's lawyers will say in response. I know the judge's pattern and the privacy grounds and the sanctions motion and all the ways Thursday could go. I cannot do anything more about Thursday today. So I read.Edmund's poems. The full forty-three. I have read them before, but I read them again today at my desk with the morning light coming in flat and gray and the city quiet below, reading slowly the way you read things you want to actually receive rather than just process.By the eleventh poem I have stopped thinking about Thursday entirely. That is the thing about Edmund's work. It does not allow for distraction. It requires you to be in the street with him, on the porch, in the specific quality of

  • 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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