All Chapters of My Ex's Boss is My Baby's Father: Chapter 111 - Chapter 120

The first sign was the sketchbook.Emma had kept a sketchbook since she was six years old, the habit starting naturally after the afternoon in Chloe's studio with the fabric remnants and developing into something daily and necessary. She drew everything: clothes, rooms, patterns, the view from her bedroom window, portraits of family members with varying degrees of accuracy and considerable emotional honesty. The sketchbooks accumulated on her shelf in chronological order, small archives of a nine-year-old's interior life.In October, Chloe noticed the current sketchbook had not moved from Emma's desk in two weeks.She did not say anything immediately. Children had rhythms, interests that ebbed and flowed, and she was careful not to be the kind of parent who monitored too closely or attached significance too quickly to normal variation. She watched instead, the way she had learned to watch: attentively but without making the watching visible.What she saw over the following weeks was n

The reading specialist used the word dyslexia on a Wednesday afternoon in March, and Chloe felt the strange double sensation of something becoming clear and something becoming larger simultaneously.Clear, because the word organised everything she had been watching for two years into a coherent explanation. The way Marcus approached letters as though they were in conversation with each other, moving and trading places. The exhaustion he brought home from school, not the physical tiredness of an active child but the specific depletion of someone who had been working harder than anyone knew at a task that other people found automatic. The way he had stopped volunteering to read aloud in class, he who had volunteered for everything, who had approached the world with the performing confidence of someone for whom attention was a natural element.Larger, because now she understood what she was dealing with, and understanding the actual size of something was not the same as being ready for i

The news came through Riley, which made it worse in a specific way.Riley had not intended it to be news. She had mentioned it in passing during a Tuesday morning briefing, the way you mentioned things you assumed the other person already knew, a casual reference to a brand launch she had seen covered in an industry newsletter. She caught Chloe's expression mid-sentence and stopped."You didn't know," Riley said."Tell me again," Chloe said. "Slowly."The brand was called Verdure. It had launched quietly three weeks earlier with a small collection that was generating significant industry attention, described by reviewers as bringing fresh innovation to sustainable luxury, a new voice with a distinctive technical approach. The founder was a designer named Priscilla Ward.Priscilla had worked with Chloe for four years. She had come through the mentorship programme, one of the earliest cohort, a woman in her late thirties who had left the industry during a difficult divorce and returned

Blair called on a Monday morning in February and said the word cancer with the particular steadiness of someone who had already spent several days alone with the word and had practised saying it until it became something she could hand to another person without dropping."Thyroid," she said. "They caught it early. The surgeon is optimistic. But it needs to come out, and then there's treatment, and the recovery is longer than I'd like."Chloe sat down. She was in her studio, surrounded by work, and she sat down in the middle of it and did not think about the work at all."When is the surgery?" she said."Three weeks. Thomas is here, obviously. His mother is coming to help with the children. I'm not calling you because I need rescuing." A pause that was slightly too long to be casual. "I'm calling because you're my sister and I wanted you to know."Chloe understood what the pause meant. Blair had spent years being self-sufficient in the particular way of someone who had learned that nee

The letter arrived three weeks after the anniversary show, forwarded from the documentary production company who had received it and, after some internal deliberation, passed it along with a note explaining they did not typically forward personal correspondence but had felt this one warranted Chloe's awareness.The handwriting on the envelope was unfamiliar. Chloe had no memory of her mother's handwriting. This struck her as she stood in the hallway holding the envelope: that she could not have identified her own mother's hand.She put the letter on the kitchen counter and did not open it for two days.On the second evening, Lucien noticed it in the same position it had been when he left for work that morning, and looked at her with a question he did not ask aloud."It's from my mother," Chloe said.He was quiet for a moment. "Do you know what it says?""I can guess."She had constructed the probable contents across two days of not opening it: the documentary had provided access she h