Lahat ng Kabanata ng Fake Dating My Ex’s CEO : Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 66

~ Lena POV ~I woke up at six thirty in Maya’s spare room.The cat was on my feet. The room was the specific grey of early morning before the city had decided to be awake, and I lay in it for a while without reaching for my phone. That was deliberate. I’d learned that the first thing you reach for in the morning is to set the temperature of the day and I didn’t want the thread setting the temperature of today.I lay in the grey and thought about last night.Not the thread. Not Ryan at the journalist cluster or the room redistributing or the screenshots circulating. I let those sit in their own category, which was real and difficult and would require management in the practical hours ahead, and I thought about the other things instead.Lena’s back straight walking through the door.That was Maya’s description of it, offered at midnight over the third cup of tea. She’d been watching the thread’s social media coverage and someone had caught it on a phone, the specific image of a woman le

~ Vanessa POV ~ The Rome morning came in through the shutters at six fifteen.Different light from New York. Warmer at the edges, the specific quality of a Mediterranean October that didn’t have the sharp clarity of a New York fall but had its own particular character, golden and unhurried and entirely unbothered by the things that had been true six time zones away the night before.I've been awake since five.Not because of the thread, which I’d checked once at midnight after the call with Adrian and then closed with the specific deliberateness of someone who had decided they were done being part of that particular story’s audience. And not because of the director, who had opinions about everything and was exhausting in the productive way that good directors were, pushing toward something better than what you’d arrived with.I’d been awake since five because I was in Rome.New city. New project. New light through unfamiliar shutters.I lay in it and let it be what it was.Olivia sen

Mrs. Rose came to the apartment in person on her Sunday off, which she'd never done before, and I knew the moment I opened the door that she'd come because some things are too heavy to say down a phone line."I had the afternoon," she said, holding up a paper bag, brisk, like it was nothing. "And you've got no proper food in this place, I'd put money on it. So I brought soup. Let me in, it's cold in that hall."I let her in. She looked around the small apartment, at the couch and the case files and Luna's drawing on the wall, and she didn't say anything about how plain it was or how far it was from the mansion. She just set the soup on the counter and found two bowls, my two bowls, and started ladling, and I understood she'd come to tell me something and wanted to do it over a table, like people, not through a phone pressed to her ear in a corner of a house that wasn't hers.We ate first. She asked about the case, about Damian, about how I was sleeping, and I answered, and it was good