Alle Kapitel von SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER: Kapitel 91 – Kapitel 100

Wednesday evenings continued. This was the thing I noticed first — the fact that they continued, that Gavin had meant what he said about going nowhere and had proven it with the simple consistent evidence of still being there. The following Wednesday he texted at six asking if I had eaten and I said no and he said there was a new ramen place on Atlantic Avenue that Marisol had declared mandatory research and we went and ate excellent ramen and talked for two hours about a documentary he had watched and a supplier issue I was having with the East Village vanilla and whether pomegranate and lamb was a genuinely interesting combination or something the Navy Yard kitchen had gotten lucky with once. We did not talk about what he had said at the Navy Yard wine bar. Not because it was being avoided. Not with the specific tension of two people pretending something hadn't happened. Just because it had been said and received and set down properly, and what was left after that was simply wha

He was still on the couch when I woke at five. I could hear his breathing from the bedroom doorway — slow and even, the deep sleep of someone whose body had finally shut down after a night of too much and too hard. I stood in the doorway for a moment looking at him in the early dark and then went to the kitchen and made coffee quietly and stood at the window watching the May morning arrive. The street below was empty. The city in its pre-dawn quiet. I thought about Isabelle in the Tribeca apartment. Whether she had slept. Whether she had woken in the night and reached across the bed and found it empty and felt — what. Relief or grief or both at once, the way things were both at once in a marriage that was carrying something too heavy for either person to hold alone. I thought about therapy and clearer vision and broken things seen precisely. I thought about what Renee had said about carrying something correctly forever. I drank my coffee. At six he stirred. I heard the couch

May became June and the secret held. Not because we were hiding it with the specific anxious energy of people doing something wrong. More because the correct order of things required time and we were giving it the time it required. Marcus was at Davis's. Isabelle was in the Tribeca apartment. The marriage was ending in the slow deliberate way that things ended when two people were being honest about it rather than dramatic. We were careful. We were present in the same spaces we had always been present in without performing anything different. Sunday dinners. Family events. The ordinary choreography of a family orbit that had always included both of us. The evenings at Davis's apartment were ours. Nobody needed to know yet. --- It was a Tuesday in the second week of June. I was at the Cobble Hill bakery after closing. The front was dark, the cases covered, the ordinary wind-down of a day completed. Marcus had texted at eight asking if he could come by. I had said yes. He came

I had not told anyone by the following Tuesday. Not Renee. Not Jade. Not Marcus. Not because I had decided not to tell them. Because I had not yet found the right words and I had always been someone who waited for the right words rather than using the approximate ones. Renee looked at me on Monday and said nothing but her eyes said she was watching. I told her I was fine. She said okay in the layered way. I was at the Cobble Hill location on a Tuesday morning, ten days after the bathroom floor, when my phone rang. Jade. I picked up immediately. "Hey," I said. "Ava." Her voice had the specific quality it had when something had happened and she was managing it badly. "Ava, I need to tell you something and I need you to stay calm." I stood at the counter. "What happened?" I said. "I was at Mom's on Sunday. Patricia's. After dinner. Marcus had already left and I was helping Mom in the kitchen and we were talking and I said—" She stopped. "I said something I shoul

I woke up to white light and a quiet so complete it felt like its own kind of sound. For a moment I didn't know where I was. The ceiling above me was unfamiliar, fluorescent panels in a grid, and there was a dull ache low in my body that hadn't been there before, and an IV line taped to the back of my hand that I stared at for several seconds before understanding what it meant. Then I remembered. The bakery. The table. The blood on my thighs. Gavin's hands lifting me. The car. The road blurring past the windows. I turned my head. Renee was in the chair beside the bed, her coat still on, her hands folded tightly in her lap in a way that wasn't like her at all. Gavin was standing near the window, arms crossed, looking at something outside that I didn't think he was actually seeing. "Renee," I said. My voice came out cracked and small. She was at my side instantly, taking my hand, the IV hand, careful of the line. "Hey," she said. "Hey, you're awake." "What happened," I said.