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Chapter 48
publish date:
2026-05-27 12:31:28
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SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 98
The bakery was silent after I said it. Isabelle had gone still on the floor, her hands still pressed against her face, and for one long moment I thought the words had landed the way I had hoped, that somewhere underneath the devastation there might be room for her to simply grieve without it turning into something worse. I was wrong. She lowered her hands. Looked at me. And what was in her face now was not the broken-open sadness of a moment ago. It was something else. Something that had been building underneath the sadness for a long time and had just found the one piece of information large enough to detonate it completely. "You're pregnant," she said. Her voice was low. Flat. More frightening than the screaming had been. "You're pregnant." "Isabelle—" I started. "I have spent four years," she said. Standing now, pushing herself up from the floor with a kind of violence in the motion. "Four years. Doctors. Tests. Procedures. Watching my own body fail at the one thing I was
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 97
I had not told anyone by the following Tuesday. Not Renee. Not Jade. Not Marcus. Not because I had decided not to tell them. Because I had not yet found the right words and I had always been someone who waited for the right words rather than using the approximate ones. Renee looked at me on Monday and said nothing but her eyes said she was watching. I told her I was fine. She said okay in the layered way. I was at the Cobble Hill location on a Tuesday morning, ten days after the bathroom floor, when my phone rang. Jade. I picked up immediately. "Hey," I said. "Ava." Her voice had the specific quality it had when something had happened and she was managing it badly. "Ava, I need to tell you something and I need you to stay calm." I stood at the counter. "What happened?" I said. "I was at Mom's on Sunday. Patricia's. After dinner. Marcus had already left and I was helping Mom in the kitchen and we were talking and I said—" She stopped. "I said something I shoul
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 96
The days after Jade left were quiet in the wrong way. Not the productive quiet of a bakery before the rush. The quiet of something broken that had not yet finished breaking. Jade didn't call. She didn't text. She was giving me the specific silence that was worse than anger, the silence that meant she was holding something too large for conversation and hadn't found the shape of it yet. I went to work. Both locations. Every morning. I made things. I was at the Financial District location on a Thursday morning in the third week of June when it happened. I was testing a new recipe. Something with brown butter and a specific combination of warm spices that I had been developing for the autumn menu, which was months away but which I always started thinking about in June because the autumn menu required the longest lead time. I pulled the test batch from the oven. The smell hit me before the pan had fully cleared the door. Brown butter and spice and the warm rich sme
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 95
May became June and the secret held. Not because we were hiding it with the specific anxious energy of people doing something wrong. More because the correct order of things required time and we were giving it the time it required. Marcus was at Davis's. Isabelle was in the Tribeca apartment. The marriage was ending in the slow deliberate way that things ended when two people were being honest about it rather than dramatic. We were careful. We were present in the same spaces we had always been present in without performing anything different. Sunday dinners. Family events. The ordinary choreography of a family orbit that had always included both of us. The evenings at Davis's apartment were ours. Nobody needed to know yet. --- It was a Tuesday in the second week of June. I was at the Cobble Hill bakery after closing. The front was dark, the cases covered, the ordinary wind-down of a day completed. Marcus had texted at eight asking if he could come by. I had said yes. He came
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 94
I went to the bakery at five. The Cobble Hill kitchen received me the way it always received me at unreasonable hours — without judgment, warm from the overnight pilot lights, smelling of the day before in the specific way closed bakeries smelled when they had been working hard and had been given a few hours to rest. I tied my apron. Started the croissants. Let my hands do what they knew. --- The morning rush came and went. I moved through it with the focused efficiency of someone who had been doing this long enough that the body ran on instinct while the mind did what it needed to do. What it needed to do was this: Last night had happened. This morning had happened. Marcus had left at nine. And now it was Saturday afternoon and I was at the Cobble Hill counter going over the supplier order and the only person in the world who knew what had happened was me. And Marcus. And the May morning that had witnessed it without commentary. I intended to keep it that way. For now
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 93
He was still on the couch when I woke at five. I could hear his breathing from the bedroom doorway — slow and even, the deep sleep of someone whose body had finally shut down after a night of too much and too hard. I stood in the doorway for a moment looking at him in the early dark and then went to the kitchen and made coffee quietly and stood at the window watching the May morning arrive. The street below was empty. The city in its pre-dawn quiet. I thought about Isabelle in the Tribeca apartment. Whether she had slept. Whether she had woken in the night and reached across the bed and found it empty and felt — what. Relief or grief or both at once, the way things were both at once in a marriage that was carrying something too heavy for either person to hold alone. I thought about therapy and clearer vision and broken things seen precisely. I thought about what Renee had said about carrying something correctly forever. I drank my coffee. At six he stirred. I heard the couch
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