Lahat ng Kabanata ng One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend: Kabanata 121 - Kabanata 130

I do not tell Lucian I am struggling.This is a decision I make consciously, somewhere between Sophia leaving at noon and Lucian coming home at nine, somewhere in the six hours I spend answering emails I don’t fully read and sitting through a media strategy call where Sophia uses words like narrative containment and pressure cycle and I take notes in handwriting that gets smaller and tighter as the hour goes on.I do not tell him because he is already carrying Emma and the board and the leak investigation and the particular grief of a man who has just learned he missed ten years of a child’s life. I do not tell him because I am the person he leans on, and I have never minded that, have never once resented it, but tonight the weight of being that person feels different. Heavier. Like something shifted in the foundation while I wasn’t looking.He comes home looking tired in a way he doesn’t usually show. He eats the dinner I reheated without tasting it. He tells me the board call went a

Gabriel Kane calls at ten past eleven.Not Marcus. Not a representative. Not a carefully worded email routed through three layers of corporate courtesy. Gabriel Kane himself, from a number that Lucian’s phone identifies by name, which means it has been saved, which means there was a time when that was a number worth keeping.I am standing in the kitchen refilling my coffee when Lucian’s phone lights up on the counter between us. He sees the name. Something in his face does not change exactly, it just goes very still, the way still water looks still but isn’t.He picks it up.“Kane,” he says.I do not leave the room. He does not ask me to.I watch his face while he listens. It is an exercise I have become very good at over two years, reading the version of Lucian that exists between his words, in the set of his shoulders and the particular quality of his silence. Right now his shoulders are back and his jaw is level and his eyes are doing that thing where they focus on a point in the m

I call Dr. Carter from the car.Her receptionist answers on the second ring and I give my name and she puts me on hold for forty seconds and then Dr. Carter herself is on the line, which tells me she left a note somewhere in my file that says something like call immediately if this patient contacts us.“Mrs. Blackwood,” she says. “I’ve been expecting to hear from you.”“I need an appointment,” I say.“Today,” she says. Not a question.“Today,” I confirm.She gives me a time. Four o’clock. Her last slot. I thank her and hang up and tell Olivia to adjust the car’s route and Olivia does it without asking why, which is one of the many reasons I would be considerably less functional without her.The clinic is small and private and located in a building that looks like it contains only law offices and financial advisors, which I suspect is deliberate. The waiting room has three chairs and a magazine rack and no television, which I also suspect is deliberate. I pay for my appointment at the

The restaurant Evelyn suggested is called Maison Privé.It is the kind of place that does not have a sign outside, only a number on a brass plate beside a door that someone opens for you before you reach it. The kind of place where the lighting is always exactly right and the tables are always exactly far enough apart and the staff have been trained to be present without being visible.Evelyn’s idea of a controlled environment.I arrive before Lucian, which was intentional. I wanted five minutes in the room before anyone else filled it. I wanted to know where the exits are and which table we have been given and whether the staff have been briefed, because these are the kinds of things I think about now, in this life, in this year, when nothing is entirely without calculation.The table is in the back corner. Good sight lines. One way in, one way out. Someone on Ethan’s team called ahead.Lucian arrives at seven on the dot with Marcus two steps behind him, which I did not expect. I loo

Sophia arrives at the penthouse at noon with her laptop, a coffee she has already half-finished, and the particular expression she gets when she has found something that changes the shape of everything and has been sitting on it long enough that the pressure is becoming unbearable.She does not say hello. She sets the laptop on the kitchen island and opens it and turns the screen toward me.“Sit down,” she says.“I’m fine standing,” I say.“Ariana.” Her voice is the quiet version. The one she uses when she is not asking.I sit down.She pulls a stool around to my side of the island and sits beside me and points at the screen. “Isabella’s social media. Every platform. Scrubbed clean exactly thirty days before she walked into Blackwood Holdings.” She clicks to a second window. “I already showed you this. But here’s what I didn’t have yet.” She pulls up a spreadsheet, columns of dates and account names and what looks like employment records. “Isabella’s last employer before she went quie