Mag-log inShare
Chapter 86
Petsa ng paglalathala:
2026-06-15 16:05:06
Pinakabagong kabanata
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 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 37
I woke up and he was still there. This was the first thing — the simple fact of it. His arm around me, the weight of him solid and real in my bed, the February morning pressing gray light through the curtains. I lay still for a moment and let the realness of it arrive properly, the way you let you
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 36
He picked a restaurant in the West Village. Not near the bakery — two blocks away from it, which was either coincidence or something deliberate that I chose not to examine too closely because both possibilities felt like the right answer for different reasons. Small, Italian, the kind of place tha
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 35
Monday arrived with the specific energy of the day after something significant. The West Village opening had been everything I had built toward for two years and the morning after it I woke at five with the particular feeling of someone who had been running hard toward a finish line and crossed it
SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER Chapter 38
He came back at three. I heard the knock at the front door and opened it and he stood in the hallway with the February cold still on him and an expression I couldn't immediately read — not the closed, managed version he wore when something was being held back, but something more open than that. Pr
Maaari mong magustuhan
Billionaire's Ex-wife is Mommy of Twins
Lami274665.6K viewsThe Unwanted Wife and Her Secret Twins
Artemis Z.Y.718.4K viewsTo Be Yours Again
Taylor1.0M viewsThe Untouchable Ex-Wife
Mizuki Sei2.7M viewsToo Late Mr SINCLAIR
Zieey155 viewsThe Billionaire's Obsession
Princ Ess84 viewsTHE CEO LEFT ME.... THEN CAME BACK BEGGING
L.NOCTURE147 viewsI Left, And They Declared War
Neemah66 views
