All Chapters of My Ex's Boss is My Baby's Father: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

The idea had existed in the margins for years.Not formally, not as a proposal or a plan, but as a recurring observation that Chloe had noted and set aside each time it surfaced: that the problem she had spent fifteen years solving in fashion existed in identical form in beauty, and that nobody with the resources and platform to address it at scale had done so in a way that was both genuinely ethical and genuinely luxurious rather than one performing the other.The sustainable beauty market was large and growing and almost entirely unconvincing. Chloe had spent years receiving product samples from brands wanting Cross Luxury Group endorsement or distribution, and the pattern was consistent: either the ethics were real and the product quality was not, the packaging was recyclable but the formula was mediocre, the cruelty-free certification was genuine but the texture was wrong in ways that communicated clearly that luxury had been the secondary consideration. Or the luxury was real and

The drawings had been in a folder under Emma's bed for three months before her art teacher saw them.Emma had not hidden them intentionally. They were simply finished, which meant they had moved from the active workspace of her desk to the completed archive of the folder, in the same way she managed all her work: in progress on the desk, finished in the folder, the folder under the bed because that was where it fit. She did not think of the folder as private. She thought of it as done.Her teacher, Ms. Adeyemi, came to the house for a home visit in November, a routine check-in with parents of students in the advanced art programme. Emma had shown her the current work in progress, the botanical illustrations she had been developing as a separate project, and then had brought out the folder because Ms. Adeyemi had asked to see everything from the past year.Chloe was in the kitchen when Emma came to find her, carrying the folder and wearing the expression of someone who had just been to

The call came on a Tuesday afternoon in October, from Lucien's assistant, which was how she knew immediately that something was wrong.Lucien did not have his assistant call Chloe. In ten years of marriage, across every complicated schedule and missed event and late flight, he had always called himself, or texted, the brief functional messages that said what needed saying without elaboration. His assistant calling her number meant he could not call himself, or had asked someone else to because he did not want her to hear something in his voice before he had contained it."He's at St. Thomas's," the assistant said. "He asked me to let you know. He said not to worry, which he specifically asked me to tell you.""What happened?"A pause. "Chest pains. He came out of a board meeting. He's being assessed now."Chloe was in her studio. She was in the middle of a fabric review that had been scheduled for three weeks. She stood up, said to Riley who was sitting across from her, "I have to go,

Riley asked for a meeting on a Monday morning, which was unusual.In fifteen years of working together, they had not met in the formal sense of scheduled calendar appointments between the two of them. They talked constantly, in the studio and outside it, in the natural rhythm of a working relationship that had long since become something else as well. Riley did not schedule meetings with Chloe. She appeared at her desk or called her mobile or sent a message that said can we talk and they talked.The calendar invitation, sent through the studio's official scheduling system, subject line reading Meeting - Riley Chen, was different enough that Chloe sat with it for a moment when it appeared.She confirmed it and said nothing, the way she had learned to give people the space to say what they were preparing to say without anticipating it in a way that changed what they said.Riley came in on Monday morning with the composed steadiness of someone who had made a decision and was not uncertai

The acceptances arrived across three weeks in March, each one producing a response in the household that Leo bore with increasing difficulty.Wharton arrived first. Lucien read the email over Leo's shoulder at the kitchen table and said nothing for a moment, then said, with the controlled enthusiasm of someone managing their reaction: "That's a significant programme." Which was Lucien for: I want this for you and I am trying not to say so too loudly.Parsons arrived four days later. Chloe was in the studio when Leo forwarded it to her and she called him immediately, and in her voice was the same controlled enthusiasm, the same careful management, which Leo recognised as identical in structure to Lucien's and different only in direction.The London College of Fashion arrived the week after. Blair sent a voice note when Leo mentioned it, twenty seconds of genuine excitement followed by a recommendation that he consider the Paris campus of a programme she had heard about from someone in