บททั้งหมดของ Brother's Best Friend Is My Child's Father : บทที่ 21 - บทที่ 30

Chapter 21 Adrian's Pov

The drive back was quiet.Not the comfortable kind of quiet that sometimes settled between Elena and me after a long evening. This was the kind that had weight to it. She was sitting in the passenger seat with her face turned toward the window and her bag in her lap and her hands folded over it, and she had not said anything since we got into the car.I kept my eyes on the road.I knew her well enough not to push immediately. Elena needed a few minutes to come down from things before she could talk about them, and the evening had been a lot. The sponsor, Dominic, the tension in that dining room, walking out before the dinner was finished. Any one of those things would have been enough. All of them together was considerable.I drove and gave her the time.After a few minutes I glanced across at her."Are you okay? Do you need to talk to me about anything? Or if you need something, I could get it for you?"She turned slightly from the window. Not fully, just enough to answer. "I'm ju

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Chapter 22 Elena's Pov

I was at the hospital by seven thirty.Not because my shift started that early. It started at nine. But the apartment had felt too small that morning and Maya had still been asleep and I had not wanted to sit at the kitchen table with my thoughts for another hour and a half, so I had dressed quietly, left a note for Adrian, and come in early.The ward was calm at that hour. A few nurses on the overnight handover, the quiet beeping of monitors, the particular stillness of a hospital before the day properly begins. I found it easier to breathe in that stillness than I had in the apartment.I made myself a coffee from the staff room and took it to the small office I had been given as part of the research project. It was not large, just a desk, two chairs, a window that looked out onto the hospital car park, but it was mine for the duration of the project and I was grateful for it.I sat down and opened the project files.There was a significant amount of material to get through. Rese

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Chapter 23 Elena's Pov

The meeting room was on the third floor, overlooking the main courtyard.Eight of us around the table. Three senior doctors, two research coordinators, two sponsors, and Sophia. I had arrived early and taken a seat near the middle of the table, set out my notes, and was going through them when Sophia came in and sat directly across from me.She smiled when she sat down. I nodded back and returned to my notes.Dr. Owens opened the meeting at ten o'clock sharp. He went through the project framework, the timeline, and the expected deliverables for the first phase. Everyone was listening, pens moving, the usual focused quiet of a room full of professionals with somewhere to be afterward.When it came to my section, I stood up."The approach I am proposing for the bone marrow treatment phase focuses on expanding the compatibility parameters we currently use during donor matching," I said. "Standard HLA typing has limitations, particularly for patients from mixed ethnic backgrounds, whic

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Chapter 24 Dominic's Pov

The quarterly reports had been sitting on my desk since eight in the morning.I turned a page read half a line and stopped.I leaned back and dropped the file down. My mind had been refusing to cooperate all day and forcing it was not working. I picked up my pen, set it back down, and looked out the window at the city below.Elena.She was the reason I could not concentrate and I knew it. The dinner, Adrian stepping forward, the look on her face when she told me she did not need my help. It was all still sitting with me and it had been sitting with me since last night without shifting.I pulled the file back toward me and made myself focus.Rita came in at half past two. She had a tablet in one hand and her expression was the particular neutral she wore when she was carrying information she was not sure how I would receive. I had learned to read that expression over the years. It meant pay attention.She went through the afternoon's correspondence first. Two calls to return, a meeti

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Chapter 25 Elena's Pov

Sophia's words would not leave me alone.I don't like weak competition.I was at my desk with the risk assessment document open on my screen and I had been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes. Every time I got through a sentence, my mind pulled me back to that meeting room. The way Sophia had leaned back in her chair when she spoke. The way she had looked at the room rather than at me when she said it, making sure everyone else heard it too. The small shifts in people's expressions afterward.One comment placed in the right room at the right time could do a lot of damage. I knew that. I had seen it happen to other doctors over the years and I had always told myself I would not let it happen to me.But sitting here now, still feeling the heat of it, I was angry. Properly angry, the kind that sat in your stomach and made it difficult to think straight.I pushed back from the desk and stood up.I walked to the window of the small office and looked out at the car park below

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Chapter 26 Adrian's Pov

I had heard about the meeting by midday.One of the research coordinators I knew from the project had mentioned it in passing, the kind of casual mention that was not actually casual at all. Tension in the room. One of the doctors challenged publicly. I had not needed him to say the name because I already knew.Elena.I finished the call I was on, rescheduled my afternoon, and drove to the hospital.I told myself I was not overreacting. I told myself she was a grown woman and a competent doctor and she did not need me showing up every time something went wrong. I had that conversation with myself the entire drive over.I still came.I found her in the corridor outside her office. She was standing with a file in her hand, not reading it, just holding it. Her eyes were somewhere else entirely and there was a tightness around her jaw that I recognized immediately.She had not seen me yet.I watched her for a moment. She looked exhausted. Not the physical kind, the other kind, the kin

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Chapter 27 Sophia's Pov

The office was quiet.I was sitting at my desk with my hands folded in front of me, not working, just thinking. The meeting had ended three hours ago and I was still turning it over.Elena had held her ground.I had expected her to crack a little. Not completely, not in a way that was obvious, but enough. A slight waver in her voice, a moment of visible uncertainty, something that would confirm what I already suspected about her. That she was good on paper but fragile when the pressure was real.She had not wavered.She had pushed back cleanly, kept her composure, and by the end of it most of the room had been nodding along with her again. I had watched it happen and I had kept my expression neutral and I had smiled when smiling was appropriate and said nothing further.But I had noticed.And the part that was sitting with me most was not Elena.It was Dominic.I picked up my pen and turned it slowly between my fingers.When he called him afterward, his voice had changed the momen

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Chapter 28 Elena's Pov

Every eye in that room was on me.I could feel it. The weight of it, all those faces turned in my direction, waiting. Dr. Fernandez was still looking at the screen with that frown and the two sponsors had stopped writing and the low whispers that had started at the far end of the table had not stopped.I stood still and looked at the data on the screen.Those were not my numbers.I knew my own work. I had gone through that data four times before I submitted it. I had cross-referenced every figure, checked every column, run the compatibility rates twice using two different methods to make sure the results were consistent. The numbers I had submitted were solid and they were correct and what was sitting on that screen right now was not what I had submitted.Something was wrong.Dr. Fernandez turned from the screen and looked at me. "Dr. Janice. Can you explain this discrepancy?"The room was very quiet.I took a breath slowly. I was not going to fall apart in this room and I was not

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Chapter 29 Dominic's Pov

Rita walked in without knocking.She only did that when something was wrong.I looked up from the desk. She was holding her tablet against her chest and her expression was the careful kind, the one she wore when she was about to say something she was not sure how I would receive."Talk," I dropped what I was doing to give her my attention.She exhaled quietly. "There was a problem at the hospital review this morning. Dr. Janice's data was presented incorrectly. The figures on the system did not match her claims and the room turned against her." She paused. "The board is now questioning her position on the project."I put my pen down."They are questioning her position," I repeated."Yes."I stood up slowly. "How dare they question her."Rita said nothing. She knew when to let me process and when to speak.I moved from behind the desk and walked to the window. The city was going on below, completely indifferent, and I stood there for a moment with my jaw tight and my hands still at my

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Chapter 30 Sophia's Pov

The morning had gone smoothly.I was at my desk going through the immunotherapy files, making notes in the margins, doing everything that a person did when they were having a perfectly ordinary working day. My handwriting was neat. My coffee was warm. Everything was exactly as it should be.The data change had been clean. I had been careful, more careful than I usually needed to be, and I had left nothing visible. A shifted decimal, a transposed figure, the kind of thing that looked like a human error on a tired afternoon rather than deliberate interference. Elena would spend days trying to explain it and the more she explained, the worse it would look.Nobody was going to find anything.I turned a page and kept readingThe meeting had gone exactly as I had intended. I had watched Elena's face when Fernandez frowned at the screen and the satisfaction of it had been immediate and clean. That moment of genuine confusion, the way her composure had cracked just slightly before she pu

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