Home / Romance / OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER / Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

All Chapters of OWNED BY MY EX'S GODFATHER: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

101 Chapters

Chapter Seventy-One:

On the morning of the launch, I wake before everyone.This has become my way with important days. My body does not wait for alarms on days that matter. It simply decides and surfaces, and there I am, awake at five thirty with the specific clarity of someone whose nervous system has been preparing for something and is done waiting.The estate is quiet around me. Alexander is breathing slow and even beside me. The April dark outside the windows, the sound of the water below the cliff, and the specific coastal quality of pre-dawn silence that is different from city silence, fuller somehow, and the ocean doing its continuous work in the background of everything.I get up carefully. Find my sketchbook. I go to the window seat in the bedroom and sit with the dark outside and the estate grounds just visible below, the April garden in the pre-dawn gray, and I draw.Not the launch. Not Edmund or the ballroom or any of what today contains. I draw the view from this window exactly as it is right

Chapter Seventy-Two:

The launch begins at seven. By six fifty the ballroom is full in the way that matters: not crowded but occupied by people who are entirely present. I stand near the back and watch them arrive and find their tables and pick up the anthology copies and page through them with the attention of people who have been told something true is inside and are already looking for it.Edmund is backstage, which in this context means the small anteroom off the ballroom where Margaret put a chair and a glass of water and left him alone when he asked to be. Sophia checked on him at six forty-five. She came back and stood beside me and said, "He is ready." I said, "How do you know?" She said he was not whispering.I understood immediately.Patrick is at the podium doing a final check on his notes. He is a man who has introduced important work many times and has developed the specific calm of someone who knows that his job is to open the door and then get out of the way. He looks up and finds me across

Chapter Seventy-Three:

The ballroom empties slowly. The same way the gallery emptied on March fourteenth. People leaving in ones and twos, staying at the door, saying the things people say when they have been somewhere that required something of them. Adaeze laughing with James near the anthology table, the laugh arriving before she does, her hands on a copy of the book she has already opened twice tonight. Ruth is sitting quietly with her wine and a woman she met an hour ago who read the letters section and came to find her immediately after.Edmund is at a table near the prints. Three people are around him, talking, and he is listening with the full attention he gives everything, his notebook out but not open, just present on the table beside his glass like a habit he carries everywhere without always using.I move through the room slowly. Not hosting exactly, just present and available. The way you are at something you have built when you want to make sure it is landing the way you made it isMaya is sti

Chapter Seventy-Four:

The morning after the launch the estate is quiet in the specific way of places that have held something significant and are now resting.I am up at six. Old habit. The coastal light is coming in differently from the city light, softer at the edges, with the water visible from the bedroom window doing its continuous patient work against the cliff below. Sophia is still asleep. I dress without turning on the overhead light and go downstairs.Margaret has left coffee on. She anticipated this, which is simply what Margaret does: anticipate the next requirement before it becomes a requirement. I pour a cup and take it to the terrace.The April morning. Cold still but with the specific quality of a cold that knows it is temporary. The garden below the terrace is just beginning; the tentative green is more certain today than yesterday. Something about the overnight hours has committed it further in the direction of spring. The water beyond the cliff was catching the early light.I stand on t

Chapter Seventy-Five:

May arrives, and with it the specific quality of a city deciding to be warm, not committed warmth. New York in May is always provisional, cold mornings giving way to afternoons that almost convince you summer is close and then evenings that remind you it is not yet. But the light is different. Higher and longer and arriving at angles that make the penthouse feel like a different place than it was in February, the floor-to-ceiling windows are doing something new with it, the morning light reaching the far wall for the first time since autumn.I notice this on a Tuesday at seven and stand at the window for a long time watching it happen.The show is still up at Meridian. Three more weeks. Clara has been sending me weekly attendance numbers, which I asked her not to do, and she does anyway because she is a woman who believes in data and considers sharing it an act of respect. The seventh piece is consistently the piece people stand in front of longest. The fourteenth is the piece people

Chapter Seventy-Six:

June arrives the way significant things arrive, not announced, just present. I wake on the first of June, and the light through the bedroom windows is different from May, more committed, the specific quality of a season that has stopped being provisional and decided to be itself. The city below is doing what the city does in early summer, louder and more alive, the specific energy of a place whose inhabitants have spent five months waiting for warmth and are now spending it with the focused enthusiasm of people who know it will not last forever.Sophia is still asleep.I look at her for a moment in the morning light. The specific quality of someone completely at rest, her hair loose, one hand open on the pillow beside her face. In thirteen days she is going to stand in a garden and say vows she has been writing since April, and I am going to hear them for the first time in front of thirty-one people, and I am, genuinely, not afraid of what she is going to say.That is new.I have spen

Chapter Seventy-Seven:

The night before the wedding, I cannot sleep again.This is becoming a pattern with important days, and I have stopped fighting it. I get up at two without waking Alexander and go to the sitting room of the estate with my sketchbook and the lamp on low and the June dark outside the windows doing its warm version of dark, nothing like the February dark of the penthouse, softer and with the sound of the water below the cliff providing a continuous background that is not silence but functions like it.I sit on the floor. Not the couch. The floor. I have been doing this more, sitting on floors, since the afternoon with Maya and the drawings. There is something about the floor that is honest. Eye level with everything. Nothing elevated. Just you and the space and whatever you are making.I open my sketchbook. I do not draw the wedding. I draw what is outside the window. The June dark. The garden is just visible in the ambient light from the estate, with the shapes of the hedgerows and the

Chapter Seventy-Eight:

June fourteenth arrives like all the days that matter, quietly. Without announcement. I open my eyes at six, and the light is already doing something specific through the bedroom curtains, the particular quality of a June morning that has decided to be perfect without being asked. I lie still for a moment and take stock of the day the way I take stock of everything important: clearly, without sentiment, with the full attention of someone who intends to be present for every part of it.Sophia is asleep beside me.She fell asleep somewhere around five thirty, finally, her breathing going slow and even after the hours of almost-sleep and the conversation in the dark and the last line of the vows sitting between us in the room like something that had been waiting to be said and was now said and was therefore fully real.I am not giving myself to you. I am showing you where I already am.I lie in the early light and hold those twelve words carefully.She is going to say them in a garden in

Chapter Seventy-Nine:

The east-wing bedroom looks over the garden.I have been standing at the window for twenty minutes watching the June morning do its work on the space below. The chairs are arranged in two sections. The driftwood arch at the far end, the greenery woven through it, the water visible through the gap in the hedgerow beyond. The anthology on every seat, the CB on every spine, caught the morning light.Margaret's team is moving through the garden with the quiet efficiency of people who know exactly what they are doing and are almost finished doing it.Clara is behind me doing something with the dress. Not adjusting. Just present. She arrived at nine with the specific focused calm of someone who has decided that today her only job is to be useful to Sophia Bennett in whatever way Sophia Bennett requires.Harriet is in the chair by the door with her coffee and her reading glasses and the anthology open in her lap because Harriet reads everything available to her at all times and a wedding mor

Chapter Eighty:

She walks toward me, and I do not look away.This is not effort. This is simply what happens when the thing you have been moving toward for a year arrives at the end of a garden path on a June morning with her father beside her and thirty-one people standing and the water audible beyond the hedgerow and the driftwood arch overhead, doing what salvaged things do when they find their right place, which is look as though they were always going to be exactly here. I watch her walk.The dress she chose herself. The charcoal under her thumbnail. The sketchbook in her clutch, which I can see from here, has a slightly rectangular shape, because she has never stopped being the woman who needs to hold her art close to her chest, and I do not want her to stop.Her father beside her. Not holding her arm in the traditional sense. Beside her. The specific geometry of two people walking in the same direction at the same pace. She chose this, and he understood the difference, and he is here doing it

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