บททั้งหมดของ Brother's Best Friend Is My Child's Father : บทที่ 51 - บทที่ 60

She walked away.I stood in the hallway and watched the door to Maya's room close and I did not go after her. There was nothing to say in that moment that would have helped. The fear in her eyes before. The kind of fear that builds when you have watched someone promise you something more than once and the situation around you has kept getting worse regardless.She was beginning to doubt me.I pushed the door open quietly. She was sitting on the edge of Maya's bed, her back to me, her hand resting on Maya's arm. Maya was asleep. Elena did not turn around when I came in but her shoulders tightened slightly, which told me she knew I was there.I stepped inside and stopped a few feet behind her."Elena."She did not turn."Look at me," I said.She turned slowly. Her eyes were tired and guarded and the fear in them was not the sharp kind. It was the settled kind. The kind that had taken up residence and was not in a hurry to leave.I kept my voice low and even. "Everything I am doing

The flat was quiet but I was not.I had tried sitting. The chair by the window, then the sofa, then back to the chair. None of it lasted more than a few minutes before I was on my feet again. The kind of stillness that the flat had settled into was not the kind I could trust. It felt held, like a breath someone was taking before they spoke.I moved through the hallway slowly, checking each door as I passed. Maya's room, closed. The bathroom, empty. The back window at the end of the corridor, latched and undisturbed. I stood at it for a moment and looked out at the rear of the building. The alley was dark. The service entrance below was closed. Two of my men were positioned at the base of the building, visible from this angle if I pressed close to the glass.I could see them. That was something.But the feeling did not go away. It sat in my chest like a low hum, the particular instinct that had kept me alive through enough difficult situations to have learned to take it seriously. S

Sleep was not coming.I had stopped trying an hour ago. I was on my feet instead, moving through the flat in the dark with the kind of slow, deliberate attention that my body defaulted to when my mind refused to rest. Front door, checked. Back door, checked. The window at the end of the corridor, latched. The window in the sitting room, latched. I pressed my hand against each frame as I went, checking the seal, checking for any give.Everything was secure.It did not help.I went back to the kitchen and put the kettle on. While it boiled I stood at the kitchen doorway and looked down the hallway.The doors were all closed. The flat was quiet. I could hear nothing from outside except the occasional distant sound of a vehicle on the main road.I made the coffee, black, and held the cup in both hands and stood there drinking it slowly.Then I put on my jacket and went outside.The cold hit immediately. The landing outside the flat was empty. I went down the stairs to the ground floor

I woke up and something felt different.I lay still for a moment trying to identify it. The flat was quiet. Maya was still asleep beside me. The light coming through the curtain was the pale, thin light of early morning. Nothing had changed visibly from the night before.I sat up slowly and looked at Maya. Her breathing was steady, her face relaxed. I watched her for a moment, then stood up carefully and walked out of the room.The sitting room light was on.Both of them were in there. Dominic was standing near the table, his phone face down beside him, his arms crossed. Adrian was on the sofa, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. They both looked up when I came through the doorway.Their faces stopped me.Not alarmed, not the tight, reactive look they had worn through the crashes and the darkness and the smoke.Focused and serious in a way that was different from all the other times they had been focused and serious in this flat.I looked between them. "What is going on?"A

I was tired in the good way.The kind of tired that comes from a full day of actual work, from moving and thinking and being useful, not the hollow exhaustion of fear and sleeplessness that had been wearing me down for weeks. My feet ached and my shoulders were stiff and I wanted to sit down and not move for an hour.I pushed the front door open and stepped inside.Maya was on the sitting room floor with her drawing pad open in front of her, a collection of coloured pencils spread out beside her in no particular order. She looked up the moment she heard the door and her whole face changed. She scrambled to her feet and crossed the room at a run."Mum, you are back."She hit me somewhere around the middle and I caught her and held her and pressed my face into her hair for a moment. She smelled of the strawberry shampoo she always used and something faintly waxy from the pencils.I pulled back and looked at her face. Her color was better than it had been. Her eyes were bright.I brushed