All Chapters of My Ex's Boss is My Baby's Father: Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

180 Chapters

Chapter 172: What Priya Carries

It happened on a Sunday, eleven weeks in, which Priya knew was within the range where this was common and which she also knew, because she had read everything there was to read about it twice over in the past eight months, was a fact that helped less than anyone who had not been through it might expect.The first one, the previous autumn, had been earlier — seven weeks — and had been, in the language the clinic used, "consistent with a chemical pregnancy," a phrase that Priya had turned over for days afterward with the specific dissatisfaction of someone whose professional life was built on the precision of language and who found this particular phrase both technically accurate and almost entirely useless as a description of what had actually happened to her.This one was different. Eleven weeks was long enough that they had let themselves, carefully, begin to believe it. Not announce it — they were still not telling anyone — but believe it privately, in the small ways: Priya had stop

Chapter 173: The Conversation

The conversation started, as many of their significant conversations did, at dinner, on a Tuesday evening in April, not because they had planned it for Tuesday but because Tuesday was when both of them happened to be home at the same time with enough of the day's momentum behind them to think clearly.Priya had made the dal she made when she was cooking rather than feeding them, which was a distinction Jack had learned across years of living with her: she cooked the dal when she had time to do it properly and when she needed the particular focus of a task that required attention without requiring thought. Jack had come home to the smell of it and understood that she had been thinking about something.They ate, and talked about other things first — a staffing issue at Aravind, the Brazil partnership rollout that had been running behind schedule and had finally found its pace — and then Priya set down her fork and said: "I want to talk about adoption."Not should we talk about, or I've

Chapter 174: The Dilemma

The notification from the European regulatory authority arrived on a Monday morning in May, routed through Bridge's legal team to Jack's desk by ten o'clock with the subject line that legal teams used when they wanted to convey seriousness without causing panic before the principals had read the underlying document.Jack read the underlying document.The claim was that Bridge's matching algorithm, in its operation across European markets, demonstrated a pattern of discriminatory practice in certain demographic interactions: specifically, that applicants from particular regional backgrounds were being matched to mentors at a statistically lower rate than the algorithm's overall performance suggested they should be, and that this disparity was consistent enough across a sufficient sample size to constitute a systemic pattern rather than statistical noise.He read it twice. Then he forwarded it to Amara, his Head of Data Science, with a single line: I need you to tell me if this is right

Chapter 175: Priya's Own Crisis

The offer arrived in June, three weeks after the Bridge disclosure had moved from crisis to process, the remediation plan underway and the third-party audit scheduled. Jack was in the middle of the mentor pool expansion work when Priya called him at eleven in the morning, which she did not normally do, and said: "Meridian has approached us."Jack knew the name. Everyone in health technology knew Meridian Pharmaceuticals: a Swiss corporation with a global footprint, a genuine reputation for research investment, and the kind of balance sheet that made acquisition offers feel like geological events rather than business decisions. "What kind of approach," he said."A serious one," Priya said. "Full acquisition. They want to meet next week.""Are you going to meet them."A pause. "I think I have to understand what they're offering before I can decide whether to decline it.""That's a yes," Jack said."That's a yes," Priya agreed.She met with Meridian's acquisition team on a Thursday, in a

Chapter 176: Nadia

The approval came on a Tuesday in September, fourteen months after they had begun the process, in a document that was straightforwardly administrative in its language and that Jack read three times before the content of it fully arrived.He called Priya from his office. She answered on the first ring, which meant she had been waiting."It's approved," he said.A silence, brief, the kind that was not absence but the opposite of absence."Alright," Priya said. Her voice had the quality it had when she was receiving something large and was processing it in the register below language. "Alright.""We can travel in six weeks," Jack said. "The coordinator will call this afternoon with the specific timeline.""Six weeks," Priya said."Six weeks," Jack confirmed.Neither of them said anything else for a moment, and the silence between them was the specific silence of two people who had been carrying a weight for fourteen months and had just been told they could set it down, and were discoveri

Chapter 178: Jack's Speech

I had declined the EthicsTech Conference twice before.The first time, four years ago, I had declined because the programme that year read like a celebration of ethical tech rather than an examination of it, and I did not want to be on a stage confirming that the industry was doing well when I was not certain it was. The second time, two years ago, I had declined because Bridge was in the middle of the government partnerships expansion and I did not have the capacity for anything that was not that.This year I accepted, because the regulatory challenge and the disclosure had made me a different kind of speaker than I would have been before them. Not more authoritative exactly. More honest, which was a different thing.The conference was held in Amsterdam in February, in a large converted industrial building near the waterfront that had the quality of spaces that had been repurposed with care: the original structure visible, nothing hidden, the history of the building part of the exper

Chapter 177: Chloe and Nadia

I arrived on a Saturday in December, taking the train rather than a taxi from the station because I had always preferred arriving into a neighbourhood on foot when I could, the walking giving me time to transition from travelling to being somewhere.Jack and Priya's street was quiet in the way of London streets on Saturday mornings, the particular stillness of a residential area that was not yet fully awake. I had been to the flat many times across the years, knew the specific sound the front gate made and the way the entry phone required a second press if the first did not register. Small things accumulated across years of visiting people you loved in their homes.Jack answered the door. He looked different than he had at the wedding two months ago, different in the way that new parents looked different: not diminished, not depleted exactly, but rearranged, the priorities reshuffled in a way that was visible in the face before it was visible anywhere else."She's in the front room,"

Chapter 179: The Anniversary

The reservation was for seven thirty, a restaurant in Marylebone that Priya had chosen because she had walked past it three years ago and noted it as a place for a specific occasion, storing it in the way she stored things she intended to return to, with the quiet certainty that the right moment would present itself.Five years felt like the right moment.The nanny had Nadia for the evening, which we had arranged a week in advance with the coordination that all evenings without Nadia required now, the planning that had become automatic in the four months since the placement. We had become, without quite deciding to become, people who planned carefully in order to have unplanned time, which I recognised as one of the structural changes of parenthood that no one described accurately in advance because the description would not be believed.We took a taxi rather than the Underground because Priya was wearing something that deserved a taxi, which she would have contested as a reason if I

Chapter 180: Bridge

The first government approached us in March, six months after the disclosure.It was the Dutch Ministry of Education, which made a certain sense given that the conference had been in Amsterdam and the speech had circulated more widely than I had expected, the full transcript published by the conference organisers and shared in enough policy circles that it had reached people I had not known were paying attention. The ministry's director of youth employment programmes sent a direct email to my professional address, not routed through Bridge's partnerships team, which I took as a signal that she had done her research and understood that this kind of conversation needed to start at the level where the values decisions were made.She wanted to discuss using Bridge's matching framework for a national youth mentorship initiative. Not Bridge the product, but Bridge the methodology: the way we thought about matching, the equity framework, the success metrics we had revised after the algorithm

Chapter 181: Broadway

The show ran Tuesday through Sunday, eight performances a week, and on Mondays I cleaned my flat and did my laundry and called my mother and slept for as much of the afternoon as my body would allow, which was usually three hours before something in me decided that sleeping past four in the afternoon was a moral failure and woke me up regardless of what I wanted.I had been in New York for two years. The Edinburgh production, a new play about three generations of a Scottish family that had been written by someone who had been saving it for twenty years and it showed in the best possible way, had transferred to an off-Broadway venue the previous spring after a run at the Festival that had produced the kind of reviews that made transfers possible. The casting director who had seen it was a woman named Diane who had been in the Edinburgh audience on the third night and had come backstage afterward with the specific directness of someone who did not have time for preamble, told me I was g

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