Lahat ng Kabanata ng FALLING FOR MY BEST FRIEND'S FATHER : Kabanata 51 - Kabanata 60

"I know it isn't simple." Her voice stayed level even as something in her chest was hammering. "I'm not asking for something simple. I'm asking for honesty. There's a difference."He was silent again. But this silence was different from the first one. This one was active, her words struck harder, as she could see him working behind it, turning something over, trying to find the place where honesty was safe enough to stand on."Last night," she said, when it became clear he wouldn't start. "You barely looked at me at dinner. And then you couldn't stop. And you know I felt every single second of both."Something flickered. "Emma.""And in the kitchen, when I asked if you were okay, you shut me out in three words. You do that. You get close and then you shut the door, and you act like I imagined the whole thing." Her voice didn't waver but her hands did, and she pressed them flat on the counter, mirroring him. "I'm not imagining it, Marcus. Am I?"The question sat between them like a liv

"We're talking," she said as she looked away."Inside, Emma." He stepped aside for her to enter."Here is fine." She said immediately.He exhaled through his nose. A muscle ticked in his jaw. He looked down the empty hallway, then back at her, and he nodded once — fine — and shifted his weight."Last night—" he started."You knocked on my door at seven in the evening," she said. "And then you left.""You didn't open it.""You didn't say anything worth opening it for."The words were quiet. Not cruel. Just honest. And somehow that was worse.Marcus had planned to be careful. He had planned to take this slow, measured, to say just enough and not too much, to keep his footing while still moving toward her. That was the plan.The plan was already dead."Where together now," he said. "And I'm saying it. I want to talk. Properly."Emma tilted her head slightly. "About what, Marcus? About how you've been standing five inches from something real for hours and choosing silence every single tim

Marcus's expression, cracked wide open, raw in a way she had never seen on him — she saw it. The war. The want. The fear of fighting, losing ground against something bigger and more honest than any rule he'd ever made for himself.He crossed the room in four steps.He stopped directly in front of her — close enough that she could see the slight unsteadiness in his breath, and he looked at her like she was the most terrifying and necessary thing he had ever stood in front of in his life."What if I get it wrong?" he whispered.Emma looked up at him, heart slamming against her ribs, and before she could answer.His phone lit up on the sofa behind them.And the name on the screen, glowing bright in the dim room, stopped everything cold.Serah.Seven letters sitting on that screen like a lit match dropped into dry grass. Emma watched the name pulse with each vibration — once, twice, three times, and felt something inside her chest go very, very quiet. Not the peaceful kind of quiet. The

"I am asking you not to make me invisible!" The words burst out of her sharp and sudden, like she had been holding them behind her teeth for weeks. "Every time we get close to something real, you retreat into complicated and difficult and all your reasons why this cannot be what it is. And I am standing here—" Her voice cracked slightly. She steadied it. "I am standing here, and I am not doing it anymore. I am not hiding what I feel, and I am not pretending it isn't there just so that you can be comfortable."Marcus stared at her.She was breathing hard, her chin lifted, her eyes bright and refusing to drop from his. And in that moment, she was the most honest thing in the room. In the whole house."I'm not asking you to hide," he said quietly."Then stop hiding yourself."The words hit him somewhere he didn't have a defense for.He moved toward her and she didn't step back. The distance between them closed like a held breath finally released."If I do this—" he started."When," she

They stood on the pavement in the pale morning light, and for a moment neither of them spoke."She's a good woman," Daniel said finally, his keys in his hand, his voice low enough that it didn't carry.Marcus didn't answer."Special." Daniel looked at him sideways. "The kind of special that doesn't come along too many times." He unlocked the car door. "That's all I'm saying."He got in. Started the engine. Pulled out of the driveway with a casual wave that meant absolutely nothing and somehow everything.Marcus stood on the pavement long after the car had disappeared around the corner.*She's just Lily's friend.*That was what he had said.And that was the lie he had chosen.But Daniel's parting words were sitting in his chest now, quiet and immovable, and Marcus understood, with the slow, sinking certainty of a man watching the ground shift beneath him, that Daniel had seen exactly what he came to see.And the real question was not whether Daniel knew.The real question was who Danie