جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 30

ALEX ♡ I was not supposed to be at the clinic. I had a call at ten, the expansion team in Dubai, a time zone that required the specific inconvenience of early morning on my end and that I had been managing for six weeks without complaint because the deal was significant and the managing was what the situation required. I had been on track for that call. I had been in my study at half past eight with the documents open and the coffee at the right temperature and the specific prepared focus of a man who has allocated his morning. Then I looked at my phone. Diana had sent a message at eight fifty-two. Three words. “Taking Rose now.” I sat with those three words for a moment. I told myself I had no reason to go. Diana was there. Doctor Charles was there. The medical situation was in competent hands and my presence would add nothing practical and would introduce a dynamic that I had not decided the shape of yet and introducing undefined dynamics into situations that were already compl

ALEX ♡ I went back to my study. Not immediately, I stood in the corridor outside the east study for a moment after the door closed behind me and let what had just happened settle into something I could work with. My grandfather had told me Rose was not random and had then refused to tell me what that meant. He had told me the person who needed to know first was not me. He had sat across from me with the composure of a man who has been holding something for a long time and has become so practiced at holding that the composure itself was the tell, too steady, too chosen, the composure of effort rather than ease. And when I asked how long he had known about her he had said nothing. Which was an answer. I walked to my study and closed the door and sat at my desk and opened Park’s file on Rose Jones. I had read it twice. I knew the contents, “her uncle’s house, the hospitality company, Demian, his mother’s illness, the specific gap between fifty thousand dollars needed and twenty do

ALEX𓆩♡𓆪I carried it through the weekend like something I didn’t know where to put.Not the file, I had returned the file to the envelope and locked it in the desk drawer and that part was done. What I carried was what the file had left behind, the specific weight of information that changes the shape of a thing you thought you already understood. I had thought I understood the situation with Rose Jones. The pregnancy, the inheritance, the strategic compliance I had constructed. I had thought I had mapped it accurately.Park’s file had shown me how much of the map I had drawn from the wrong angle.I went through the weekend doing the things the weekend required, calls that couldn’t wait, a document that needed review, a dinner with my grandfather on Saturday that I got through with the particular performance of normalcy that large family dinners required. Don Christopher watched me across the table with the eyes of a man who noticed everything and said nothing about most of it, wh

ROSE𓆩♡𓆪Alex was different, he has become different of late. Not dramatically different, not in a way that announced itself or required acknowledgment or could be pointed to and named cleanly. Just different in the accumulation of small things that I had been cataloguing with the same careful attention I applied to everything in this house.The glass of water that appeared on the kitchen counter before I got there. Not every morning, just some mornings, the ones when I came down slightly later than usual, as though someone had noted my pattern and adjusted for it without being asked.The door to the garden held open on Tuesday when his hands were full and mine were too and the holding required him to pause in the middle of something he was doing.The way he stood in the corridor outside my room on Wednesday evening, I had heard the footsteps stop and the particular quality of the silence that followed, the silence of someone who had paused rather than passed, and then after a mo

ROSE𓆩♡𓆪I told myself it didn’t matter.I said it out loud, quietly, to the closed door of my room, standing with my back against it and my hands flat against the wood behind me and the image of the two of them still sitting somewhere behind my eyes where I couldn’t quite reach to remove it.It doesn’t matter, she was here before me. Just like she will be here after I leave. I was here because of the babies. That was the full and complete reason for my presence in this house and in this life and in any proximity to Alex Christopher. The babies. Two heartbeats on a screen that I had pressed my hand over and made quiet promises to. Two lives that were mine regardless of what their father did in his study in the afternoon with women from his past, or is she still a past considering that I just saw them kiss and almost had sex. I was not here because of anything else.I was not here for any reason that gave me standing to feel what I was currently feeling and therefore what I was cur