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Chapter 9: Casper
publish date:
2026-06-03 16:17:07
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THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 40: The Evidence
Ivy’s POVI came home to an empty apartment.That was the first thing, the particular quality of a space that had been recently occupied and recently vacated. Not the empty of a place where nobody had been all day. The empty of a place where two people had been and were now somewhere else together.Both doors closed. No sound from either room. No Daisy on the couch. No Dexter in the study with the light on and a case file open. Just the apartment in its Friday evening quiet with the city outside the windows doing its weekend thing.I stood in the hallway for a moment and just registered it.They were out. Together. At the dinner that had been booked and confirmed and anticipated since Wednesday morning when I had heard his voice through the walls saying have dinner with me and her saying yes and I had stood in the corridor with my hand over my mouth being extremely mature about the whole situation.I went to the kitchen.The counter told its own story.A takeout menu, the one from t
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 39: The Dinner
Daisy’s POVThe restaurant was exactly right.That was the first thing I thought when we walked in, not impressive, the way he had said, but right. Small and warm and lit with the kind of light that made people look like themselves rather than like versions of themselves designed for being seen. Close tables with enough distance between them for real conversation. A menu written on a small card without the ceremony of leather covers. The kind of place that existed for eating and talking rather than for being seen to eat and talk.He had thought about this.Not about what would look good or communicate the right signal, about what would feel right. There was a difference and I had spent enough time around people who confused those two things to appreciate it when someone understood the difference.We were seated at a corner table. He pulled out my chair and I sat and he sat across from me and we opened the small menus and I looked at the food and thought about how very ordinary and ver
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 38: Getting it right
Dexter’s POVI had been thinking about this dinner since Wednesday morning.Not obsessively, I was a lawyer, I had a full caseload, I had a managing partner who sent emails at six in the morning with the cheerful energy of someone who did not believe in boundaries between professional and personal time. I had things to do and I did them. But underneath the doing of them, in the background of every meeting and brief and phone call, Friday was there. The awareness of it. The particular weight of something I had wanted to get right and now had to actually get right.I had made a reservation at a restaurant I had eaten there once, two years ago, for a quiet dinner with a colleague after a long trial at court. It was not a place designed to impress. No marble entrance, no lighting that felt like a set, no menu that required translation. It was a corner restaurant in a quieter part of the city with good food and close tables and the kind of warm noise that allowed for conversation without p
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 37: He asked again
Daisy’s POVWednesday morning arrived the way Wednesday mornings did, without announcement, without ceremony, with the particular quality of a week that had already been significant and was not finished yet.I had slept well. That was worth noting because I had not been sleeping well for most of the weeks I had been in this apartment. The grief moved around at night, finding the gaps in the day’s busyness and filling them. But Wednesday morning I woke up at seven and the room was light and I lay there for a moment and felt something that was not quite peace but was in that direction.Friday works. I had sent it. It was sent. The message existed in the world and Dexter had read it. I knew because the small indicator under the text had changed, and that meant the thing was in motion and I had made a choice and I was standing inside it.I was choosing not to be afraid of it.That was the decision I had arrived at somewhere between the sunflower and the bathroom mirror and Casper’s hand
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 36: Lily again
Ivy’s POVThe first call I could explain away.Eight months of silence and then a warm check-in, that was within the range of things that happened between people who had shared a social circle and drifted. I had not liked it but I had been able to file it as possibly genuine and move on.The second call I could not explain.It came on a Wednesday evening while I was in my room pretending to read and actually thinking about the sunflower on the kitchen counter and whether Daisy had seen it yet and what her face had done when she did. My phone lit up with Lily’s name and I looked at it for a moment before I answered.“Lily,” I said.“Ivy.” Warm. Easy. The particular voice of someone who had practised this call before making it. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”“Not at all,” I said. “What’s up?”“I was thinking about Marcus’s birthday next weekend,” she said. “He’s doing something at that rooftop place on the west side, you know the one. And I thought it would be lovely to have a proper gr
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 35: The sunflower
Dexter’s POVI bought it from the corner shop on the way home.Not from a florist, from the small corner shop two blocks from the building that sold everything from batteries to birthday cards to slightly overpriced fruit. There was a bucket of flowers by the door, the way there always was, and the sunflowers were at the front of it. Yellow and large and turned toward the light coming through the shop window in the particular way that sunflowers always did.I stopped when I saw them.She had said it weeks ago, not as a declaration about flowers, not as a hint, just as a thing that came out in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely. Sunflowers are the only flower that looks happy about existing. Said with that slight curve of her mouth that meant she had just thought of something she found genuinely pleasing. I had been half listening and half watching her face and I had filed it the way I filed everything she said without intending to file it.The way she took her
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 14: The return
LILY♡I do not lose.That is the foundational truth I built myself back on after Dexter. Eight months of careful reconstruction, my professional reputation polished back to its best, my social calendar full again, my appearance as controlled and considered as it has always been. I went through t
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 13: At 11 P.M
DEXTER♡I was not waiting.I want to be clear about that. I was not sitting on the couch in the dark at eleven fifteen on a Saturday evening waiting for Daisy Brown to come home from a date with a cardiologist whose staff profile I had looked at twice and whose publication history I had absolutely
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 12: The first date
DAISY ♡Casper picked me up at seven.He was waiting outside the building when I came down, not in the lobby checking his phone, not parked at the curb sending a text to say he was there. He was standing outside, his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the street with the easy patience of someo
THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME Chapter 11: Unknown Number
IVY♡I had always been good at reading rooms.It was something I developed young, growing up with Dexter meant learning early how to read the temperature of a space before you walked fully into it. When he was in a good mood the apartment had a certain looseness to it. When he was not, everything h
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