All Chapters of HOW I BECAME THE BILLIONIARE’S SURROGATE.: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The thing about Cassandra Morelli and in fact, Aria had been contemplating this for quite some time, analyzing it with the meticulousness she typically reserved for things she had not completely failed to grasp yet was that she was, by no means, simply a problem or an obstacle. She was definitely not a person to be managed, neutralized or diplomatically circumvented only, for that matter. She is a woman who has experienced a deep passionate almost territorial love for her brother through the twenty years, a love which was so intense that only a person assigned the role at the age of eight could have such a profound feeling, and only certain children could seriously take their roles to an extent of considering them as their identity and not merely affection.At the age of eight, Cassandra Morelli acquired a brother. She was not asked for her opinion. He came to the Westchester house with a packed bag by the door and a face that gave nothing away, and she had looked at him across the en

On a dull Sunday in November she came across it on the very last page of her mother's notebook, written in a pencil so faint that it hadn't been visible in any of the digital scans the detective's office had done the first weeks of the investigation. She wouldn't have noticed it if the daylight coming through the library window hadn't been at such an angle the very light angle of the late year that even shallow marks become visible at five in the afternoon of the winter and she happened to be sitting in the window seat with the diary on her lap and the angle was just right and the pencil marks suddenly revealed themselves. Her body became very quiet. A name. A place. A time. Besides the place, in bigger letters that were also more deeply indented into the paper: The medic. He is aware. He fled. She was still for a whole minute before she changed position. And then she took six pictures of it, changin

In February it had a title. She had resisted giving it a name because a name was a commitment. And she had been training herself, in this program and in this life, to be more careful about what she committed to before she understood it completely. A name constrained the possibilities.A name said this is what this is, instead of allowing for all that this may become.But I'd asked for it for the program's internalrecordsthe end-of-year showcase catalog, the publicity, the formal presentation that would have gone to the guest buyers who attended the graduation exhibit and I'd been staring at the blank spot on the form for three days before I realized the name was staring at me and I was refusing to look at it.Hereditary.It was her mother's money that funded the private investigator. Her mother's ledger provided her with the financial documentation she so needed. Her mother's journal that had led her piece by piece toward the truth. It was her mother's recipe that had sustained her on

She finished reading the letter that night. She had arrived home on the evening flight and Adrian had been at the arrivals control which she hadn't expecting? She had arranged for Marcus to meet her.Marcus was there. Adrian was also there in his dark coat with the fixed gaze of a man who has resolved himself to being somewhere so is. In this she felt in him something she could not name cleanly and not make mention of.She had given him the outline in the car the doctor, the statement, the link to Anderson's financials that the investigator was now running vs the information she's collected.He had listened with his compartmentalized, turned-blue-attention, and he had asked three pointed questions, and when she answered them, he had been silent for the rest of the drive in a contemplative, efficient silence of a man digesting information for its significance.They had come home and made tea.She'd taken it to the library. She repeated the three separate sentences three times each afte

She told him she loved him, on New Year's at 11:52. They had been to a dinner in ChelseaElena's friends, warm and eclectic, a celebration that had lasted long enough that the ritual itself had become endearing rather than new and fresh.She had worn the amber-gold silk Cassandra had given her; she had thrown on makeup, the simplest, the best that let the fabric do the talking; and she had run the room with the real, spoken-for appreciation that was her way of doing rooms, and had already caught him watching her from across the gallery at least twice.They had arrived home at eleven because she was so tired the baby and the traveling of the past week, and the specific cumulative tiredness of someone who has had her arms raised in the air and been carrying, all week, twenty pounds that they have just gotten comfortable with and because he had been ready to leave from an hour past the moment they arrived, his date with parties.The penthouse at eleven-forty had the feeling of their own r