Too Late To Love Me, Mr Billionaire のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 161 - チャプター 170

KIRA POVThe last guests left at eleven forty-three or something like that.Kira knew the exact time because she checked her watch the moment the door closed behind them, not because she was eager for the night to end but her feet had been telling her to sit down for the past two hours and she’d been refusing to listen. She stood in the middle of the empty dining room while her staff moved around her breaking down tables and collecting linen, the comfortable winding-down noise of a kitchen cooling after a long service, and let herself take it in properly for the first time all night.Brooklyn Phoenix had done it.Alyssa had shown her the reservation system before closing it out, eighty-seven covers, three full turns on the main floor, the bar receipts alone enough to make the projections look conservative, and two separate tables had asked about booking for the following month before their dessert plates were cleared. The Vogue critics had stayed until ten-thirty and ordered the tast

KIRA POVThe Natasha situation had been sitting in Kira’s chest like a stone since Friday.James had called earlier that evening the way he said he would, walking her through the legal position in a careful way of his that meant the news wasn’t good but wasn’t catastrophic either. The journalist was freelance, writing for a mid-tier food publication with a decent readership and a comments section that ran hot. James had sent a formal statement on Kira’s behalf, professional and precise, outlining her chef’s training lineage and the provenance of every dish on the Brooklyn menu, and the journalist had acknowledged receipt without responding further.Which meant the piece was still going to air, whether they agreed or not.Kira had spent most of Saturday in the Brooklyn kitchen running lunch service and trying not to check her phone every twenty minutes, and mostly failing at the second part. Her sous chef had noticed, because he noticed everything, and had started narrating ticket tim

KIRA POVShe sat with her laptop for an extra hour before she finally moved.Not because she didn’t know what to do, she’d known within five minutes of reading that sentence on Alyssa’s screen, but because she’d learned the hard way that walking into a conversation with Marcus while her pulse was still running fast was the fastest way to lose him, and she couldn’t afford to lose him again, not on this, not when she finally had something solid enough to put in his hands.Alyssa made fresh coffee without being asked and was sitting at the other end of the table going back through the food blog from the beginning, reading every post, screenshot-ing anything that mentioned Isabel or Elijah or the restaurant group by name, building the kind of paper trail that couldn’t be argued away on the basis of a sister’s instinct or a grievance that looked so personal.Kira watched her work and thought about Marcus.She thought about every conversation she’d tried to have with him since the summer,

KIRA POVShe was the one who even suggested lunch herself.That was the important part, making sure it came from her, making sure Sophia received it the way Kira intended her to receive it, as an olive branch from a woman who’d finally decided to stop making her brother’s life difficult. She knocked on Marcus’s door on a Wednesday evening and said she wanted to take Sophia out, just the two of them, wedding dress shopping and lunch, and she’d watched Marcus’s face do something she didn’t quite understand.He immediately stood up and hugged her.Properly, both arms, the way he used to when they were younger and something had gone right, and he’d said thank you into her hair and she’d held on for a second longer than she needed to because whatever else was true, that part was real.Sophia had texted her that night. Marcus told me. I’d really love that, Kira. Thank you.Kira typed back a string of love emojis and set her phone face down on the nightstand.They’d chosen a bridal boutique

KIRA POVKira sat at the table for exactly four minutes before she decided to move.The waiter came by once to ask if she needed anything and she’d smiled and said she was fine and watched him walk away and then sat there with her water glass and the half-eaten bread basket and the ambient noise of a full Sunday lunch service moving around her and told herself she was being paranoid.She shifted her chairs backwards and sprang up on her feet. It wasn’t a decision exactly, more like her body making a calculation her brain was still arguing with, because the whole point of today was to be exactly what she’d been for the past two weeks, warm and present and utterly without suspicion, and following someone into a restaurant bathroom was not that.But the way Sophia had covered that screen so fast, and the name being just three letters and had seen enough of them to know it wasn’t Marcus, wasn’t Elena, wasn’t anyone whose name showing up on a phone required that particular quality of st