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Chapter 85
publish date:
2026-06-15 16:05:03
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SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 102
January arrived in Sydney with the full commitment of a summer that had decided to make itself known. The heat was serious in the way Sydney January heat was serious — not aggressive, not the punishing concrete heat of a New York summer, but pervasive, the kind that arrived before dawn and settled into everything and made the city move at a different pace than the rest of the year. I had adapted. This was the thing I noticed most about myself in January, the small quiet evidence of someone who had been somewhere long enough to stop being a visitor. I bought a second fan for the flat above the Newtown kitchen. I learned which streets stayed shaded longest in the afternoon. I knew the specific hour the coastal walk was best done to avoid the midday heat and I did it at that hour without having to think about it. I had become someone who lived here. Not permanently. Not with the full weight of a life planted somewhere. But genuinely, in the day-to-day sense of a person who had found
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 101
October in Sydney was the beginning of spring. I had forgotten this from the first time. Or not forgotten exactly, more that the seasonal reversal had stopped registering as strange and had simply become part of the texture of being here. The jacaranda trees were beginning their bloom again, the purple arriving slowly on the Surry Hills streets like something being remembered rather than something new. I noticed this. I noticed most things in October with the specific sharpened attention of someone who had decided that noticing the world around her was preferable to being inside her own head. I had been in Sydney for four months. --- Patrick had been good about the hours. In July and August I had worked too much and he had let me because he understood why and because the kitchen needed the help and because sometimes the most useful thing you could do for someone was simply give them somewhere to put their hands. By September he had started gently redirecting me. "Go," he said
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 100
The days after the hospital blurred together in a way that made it difficult, later, to remember them individually. I was discharged on a Thursday. Renee drove me home and helped me up the stairs and stayed the first night on my couch without asking if she should, just doing it, because some things didn't require asking. I didn't go to the bakeries. Sam and Maya ran the four locations between them with Renee checking in remotely, and I lay in my apartment with the blinds drawn and the days passing in a way that had no real shape to them. Morning became afternoon became evening without my participation. I ate when Renee put food in front of me. I slept in long broken stretches that left me more tired than before. I did not look at my phone. It sat on the kitchen counter accumulating messages I didn't read, the screen lighting up periodically with names I couldn't bring myself to see. Jade. Patricia. Marcus, fewer times than the others, as if he understood better than anyone that h
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 99
I woke up to white light and a quiet so complete it felt like its own kind of sound. For a moment I didn't know where I was. The ceiling above me was unfamiliar, fluorescent panels in a grid, and there was a dull ache low in my body that hadn't been there before, and an IV line taped to the back of my hand that I stared at for several seconds before understanding what it meant. Then I remembered. The bakery. The table. The blood on my thighs. Gavin's hands lifting me. The car. The road blurring past the windows. I turned my head. Renee was in the chair beside the bed, her coat still on, her hands folded tightly in her lap in a way that wasn't like her at all. Gavin was standing near the window, arms crossed, looking at something outside that I didn't think he was actually seeing. "Renee," I said. My voice came out cracked and small. She was at my side instantly, taking my hand, the IV hand, careful of the line. "Hey," she said. "Hey, you're awake." "What happened," I said.
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 15
He kept his word. This was the thing about Marcus Calloway that I had always known and had somehow failed to fully account for when I'd set everything in motion — he was a man who did what he said he would do. Not performatively, not with fanfare, just quietly and completely, the way he did most t
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 14
I opened the bakery at six on Saturday as usual. This was not unusual. Saturdays were our busiest morning — the neighborhood came out for weekend pastries the way it came out for nothing else, unhurried and deliberate, people who had been eating efficiently all week allowing themselves the particu
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 13
November arrived the way it always did in New York — without apology. One morning the air was crisp and manageable and the trees along Court Street still held their color, and the next morning you stepped outside and the wind had a different quality to it entirely, something serious and committed,
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 8
The thing about intelligent women was that they noticed everything.I had understood this about Isabelle Ferreira from the moment I met her — from the way she listened at that first Sunday brunch, the quality of her attention, the precision of her questions. She was a corporate attorney who argued
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