All Chapters of THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

40 Chapters

Chapter 1: Some things never change

DAISY ♡Losing my parents I never expected it to happen like that. A car crash. Quick and final and completely without warning. It has been two weeks now but every morning I wake up and there is a full second just one second where I forget. Then it comes back. And it hits the same way it hit the first time.I could not stay in that house alone. I had lived my whole life around the sound of my mother in the kitchen and my father’s laugh down the hallway and now the house just held the echo of them. Every room. Every corner. The silence was the loudest thing in it.Ivy had called three days after the funeral. She did not ask if I was okay, she already knew I wasn’t. She said, “Pack your bags. Stay as long as you need.” That was Ivy. No fanfare. Just a door swung open.So I packed. Two suitcases. My camera. The small framed photo of my parents from the mantelpiece that I wrapped in one of my sweaters so it wouldn’t break. I moved around the house slowly, touching things I wasn’t read

Chapter 2: The inconvenience

DEXTER ♡I never agreed to this.That is the part Ivy conveniently leaves out whenever she makes decisions for the both of us, that I live here too, that my name is also on this lease, and that having someone occupy my space without my consent is not something I particularly enjoy. But Ivy has never once asked for my permission when it comes to things she has already decided. She just does them and presents me with the result like a done deal.And somehow the result is always something I have to live with.I watched Daisy Brown walk up my staircase and tried to put my finger on what it was about her that got under my skin so quickly. It wasn’t the grief that I understood. Losing both parents at once was the kind of loss that rearranged a person. I wasn’t heartless enough to hold that against her.It was the mouth.Sharp, precise, completely unbothered by who was receiving it. Your presence wouldn’t have brought them back. Said to my face, in my living room, within ten minutes of walk

Chapter 3: He made you coffee?

DAISY ❀I knew someone might hear me.That was the thing about grief, it didn’t wait for convenient moments. It came when the lights were off and the apartment was quiet and there was nothing left to distract you from the size of the absence. I had held it together through the drive, through tea with Ivy, through Dexter and his lipstick and his territorial comments about the furniture. I had held it through dinner and through the small talk and through all the ordinary motions of a person who was fine.But the moment I closed my bedroom door and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, I cried uncontrollably. I pressed my face into the pillow before the sound could get out. Let it move through me in waves hot and silent and exhausting, with my fingers gripping the pillowcase and my shoulders shaking with the effort of keeping it contained. My mother’s face. My father’s smile. The way the house sounded now without either of them in it.I cried until there was nothing left to cry and

Chapter 4: He kissed me.

DAISY ❀Ivy knocked twice before she walked in, which was her version of privacy.I was on the bed with the television going and a bowl of popcorn I had barely touched, half watching a reality show I couldn’t follow because my mind kept drifting to places I didn’t want it to go. She leaned against the doorframe in a yellow dress that meant she had somewhere to be.“I have a date at five,” she said, and her voice carried that particular apologetic warmth. “Will you be okay here alone?”I muted the television. “Ivy. Go.”“I just want to make sure…”“I am a grown woman,” I said. “I will watch television or take a walk around the compound or do absolutely nothing productive and I will be completely fine. Go on your date.”She chewed her lip. “You can call me. Any time. I don’t care what we’re doing.”“I know.” I got up and crossed the room and hugged her properly, “Thank you for caring about me this much. Now go. Wear the gold earrings, not the silver.”She pulled back and pointed at m

Chapter 5: Who was that?

DAISY ❀My composure cracked.Just slightly. Just enough that I felt it, a hairline fracture running through the careful architecture I had spent the walk from his bedroom building. I had told myself it was a mistake before my feet hit his floor. I had repeated it getting dressed. I had carried it down the hallway like something I was absolutely certain of.Then he said morning like that and the certainty developed a problem.It was the way he said it. Not guilty. Not distant. Not the careful blankness of a man filing a night away and moving on. He said it the way you say something you mean completely quiet and level and with his eyes on mine like he had been standing at that counter waiting and had already decided what he thought about all of it.I did not know what to do with that.“Morning,” I said back.My voice came out steady. That was something. I moved to the coffee machine and focused on the very important task of finding a mug and filling it and not thinking about the fact

Chapter 6: She called it a mistake

IVY ❀I was not blind.I had known my brother for twenty four years and I had known Daisy for six and I walked into that kitchen this morning and the air was so thick I nearly choked on it. Daisy in Dexter’s shirt. Dexter at the counter with his hands flat on the surface and his jaw doing the thing it does when he is feeling something he has decided not to name. The particular silence of two people who have just agreed to pretend something didn’t happen and are already failing at it.I sat down. I poured coffee. I said absolutely nothing.This was the most disciplined thing I had done in recent memory.I am a talker. Dexter will tell you that, Daisy will confirm it. I process things out loud and I have opinions about most situations and I share them with enthusiasm and without much filtering. Staying quiet in that kitchen this morning cost me something real.But I had learned a long time ago that there are moments when the most useful thing you can do for people you love is take up ve

Chapter 7: I am not one of your girls

DEXTER ♡Three days of watching her time her movements around the apartment like she was running a careful operation. Shower before I got up. Meals at different hours. Every interaction is reduced to the minimum number of words required and not one more.I told myself it was fine. Clean, even. The sensible outcome of a night that should not have happened and had been correctly labelled by the person with more sense between us. She called it a mistake. I had not agreed out loud but I had not pushed back either and the distance had settled into the apartment like a weather system neither of us acknowledged.It was fine.It was absolutely not fine.I noticed everything. The exact moment she heard my door and adjusted her route through the kitchen. The way she looked at the hallway before entering a room. The careful performance of two people who were pretending so hard they had started to convince everyone except each other.I worked late. I ran longer than usual. I sat in the study with

Chapter 8: one knock

DAISY♡I closed the door.Pressed my back against it and stood in the dark of my room and breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way you breathe when you are trying to convince your body that everything is fine and your body is not fully convinced yet.I had done the right thing. I knew that. I had stood in that corridor and looked at him and heard what he was offering and I had said no with my chin up and my voice steady and I had walked away and that was the correct sequence of events for a woman with any sense of her own worth.I had done the right thing.It felt terrible.That was the part nobody told you about that doing the right thing had its own particular ache. Not the dramatic kind. Not the loud falling apart kind. Just a quiet persistent discomfort, like a stone in a shoe you could not stop thinking about no matter how many other things you tried to think about instead.I pushed off the door and crossed to the window.The city was doing what it always did

Chapter 9: Casper

DAISY ♡Two days of the coffee on the counter and the careful kitchen choreography and the silence that had taken up permanent residence in the apartment like a guest nobody had invited but nobody knew how to ask to leave. Two days of doing the right thing and feeling it in my chest like a low persistent ache that would not fully resolve.On the third evening I picked up my phone.Not for him. I want to be clear about that. I picked up my phone because I was a person with a life outside this apartment and outside this situation and it was time I started remembering that.I scrolled back through my messages until I found the thread I had been slow with. Casper King, the cardiologist from the medical journal, was shot three weeks ago. I had met him on a Tuesday morning when I was photographing their quarterly campaign and he had come in for his slot and been so genuinely easy to direct that we had ended up talking for forty minutes after the shoot was technically over. About photography

Chapter 10: The Cardiologist

DEXTER ♡She said it and went to her room still smiling and I stood in the kitchen with the unopened beer and the word sitting in the air where she had left it and I turned it over once and knew immediately it was not the full answer.A friend did not produce that particular smile. A friend did not put colour in a person’s face on a Tuesday evening when the apartment had been carrying the weight of the last few days like furniture nobody could agree where to put. A friend was not someone you stepped onto the balcony to call, choosing the open air and the city noise over the warmth of the living room, creating distance from the walls and the people inside them.I knew what a friend sounded like from outside a balcony door.That was not it.I put the beer in the fridge and went to my study and opened my laptop and told myself I was going to work. I had a brief due Friday and three emails I had been postponing and a stack of case notes that needed annotating before morning.I opened a ne

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