All Chapters of HOW I BECAME THE BILLIONIARE’S SURROGATE.: Chapter 51 - Chapter 57

He was deciding on the tenth piece when the other vehicle showed up.This was the kind of fascination that sticks to you later unconsciously and in a very odd and random way like the mind gripping tight to the small and palpable while the huge and intangible are simply too much to handle. She had been thinking of the coat, of the lining, of whether the silk she had purchased from the Canal Street importer was the right weight or whether the way it would change with movement would be the reason the whole silhouette was ruined, and the deciding part of her was telling that it was exactly right, that she had known that it was exactly right from the very first moment, and that the little voice of doubt was the ordinary doubt of a person who has gone so far in something that she can no longer trust her own judgement about it.Just then the car came from the left.Turns out it had been on standby. The traffic cam at the junction had captured a four-door car, engine running, illegally parked

She returned on a Thursday.The penthouse looked exactly as she had left it. But it felt totally different, the way something familiar can suddenly feel unfamiliar after you have been somewhere awful and come back. The dimensions had not changed.The light in the room was the same autumn light that she had seen four days ago. The scent was the unique mixture of coffee and the particular freshness of a well-kept apartment that she had started to associate with the smell of home.Yet.After Marianna had helped her with her coat (having a fractured wrist made most activities that needed two hands into things that needed help), she stood in the entrance hall for a moment, glancing at the penthouse and sensed how the familiar place had gained a new aspect, the aspect that places get when something happens in them, or in you, that changes your relationship with them forever in a subtle way.She felt like, I have changed. Not in a way I can pinpoint exact

What changed after the accident was not what she thought would change. She thought grief would cause distance the kind of specific, contracted distance grief sometimes calls for, the turning inward that is not rejection but is equally isolating, She thought she would need for a period of time the solitude that processes things without an audience.Though, what she ended up requiring was the very thing she was most alien to. She had to create.With a wrist immobilized by a brace, ribs that confined her movement by pain, and the collection waiting with the calm, forgiving patience of the very works to which one keeps promising a return when finally ready, she flopped down in the studio the day that marked four since she had gotten home from the hospital, the same place where she was back, not surprisingly, with the same work that had given her the idea and that had been relying on her coming back to it for a long time, as if in slow and unconditional remembrance. She was