Lahat ng Kabanata ng Brother's Best Friend Is My Child's Father : Kabanata 11 - Kabanata 20

I kept walking.My legs were moving faster than I was telling them to and my hands were still shaking and I could not get the image out of my head. Dominic standing there with a gun in his hand and then a man dropping and the silence afterward.I pressed my back against the corridor wall and stopped."Get it together," I whispered to myself. "Elena, get it together right now."But my heart would not slow down. I could feel it beating against my ribs, fast and uneven, and my breathing was coming out too shallow. I pressed both hands flat against the wall behind me and forced myself to take one slow breath. Then another.It did not help as much as I needed it to.I had just watched a man get shot. I had watched Dominic shoot him. And the part that kept replaying in my head, the part I could not get past, was not even the gun or the sound or the man on the floor.It was Dominic's face. How calm it was. How completely unbothered. Like what he had just done was nothing. Like it was ordin

I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the floor.The cab had dropped me outside the apartment twenty minutes ago and I had come straight upstairs and sat down and I had not moved since. My feet were cold from the pavement and the oversized shirt I was still wearing was not mine and every time I closed my eyes I saw the same thing.I pressed both hands over my face."Stop it," I whispered. "Stop replaying it."But my mind would not cooperate. It kept going back to that room, to the doorway, to the moment Dominic turned and saw me standing there. His face. That was the part I could not shake. Not angry, not guilty, not even surprised. Just completely, utterly calm.Like it was nothing.Like he had done it a hundred times before.I stood up because sitting still was making it worse. I walked to the window and looked out at the street below. It was late and the road was quiet and the city looked completely ordinary from up here, which felt wrong somehow. Everything looked too norma

The dinner was at the Meridian, which meant the usual crowd.Old money and new money in the same room, pretending they had always been comfortable with each other. Hospital directors and research heads sitting alongside the kind of businessmen who wrote cheques large enough to put their names on buildings. I had been to enough of these evenings to move through them without effort, saying the right things to the right people, keeping conversations exactly as long as they needed to be and no longer.I was standing with two of the project's lead sponsors near the far end of the room. Gerald Ashe, who ran a pharmaceutical group out of London, was talking about regulatory timelines in a way that required very little from me beyond the occasional nod. I was giving him that much and keeping the rest of my attention on the room the way I always did in gatherings like this.I was always aware of exits, of who was standing where, of any shift in the energy of a room before it became visible

The three of us were standing in a triangle and the space between us felt very small.The sponsor had already quietly removed himself, which I was grateful for, because the tension coming off both Adrian and Dominic was enough to manage without adding a third person to it. Around us the party continued, conversations flowing, glasses clinking, the easy noise of a professional dinner that had nothing to do with what was happening in this particular corner of the room.I looked at Adrian first, then at Dominic."Please," I said, keeping my voice low. "Don't do this here."Adrian glanced at me but stayed where he was, close enough that his presence was a statement.Dominic said nothing.He was looking at Adrian with an expression that was difficult to read. Not openly hostile, not aggressive, just very still in the way he got when he was thinking carefully about something. Then he looked at me, and that was harder to hold because his eyes were not as calm as his face."I don't want to

I left the event at half past nine.Not because the evening was over. There were still people to speak to, conversations worth having, the kind of networking that kept certain doors open. Under normal circumstances I would have stayed another hour at least.But I was not in the right frame of mind to be in a room full of people anymore, and I knew myself well enough to know when it was better to leave than to stay and say something that could not be taken back.I got into the car, closed the door, and sat there.The street outside was quiet. The driver was waiting for my instruction but I did not give one. Not yet. I needed a minute.My jaw was tight. I was angry and I was not going to pretend otherwise, not here alone in the back of a car with nobody watching. The evening had gone in a direction I had not planned for, and the part that was sitting with me most heavily was not the dinner or the sponsors or any of the professional conversations I had navigated.It was Adrian.I turne