Semua Bab Can’t Stay Away From My Best Friend’s Billionaire Brother: Bab 61 - Bab 68

Emma was helping Julian sort through old boxes from their father’s storage unit, a task she’d volunteered for out of some stubborn belief that facing the wreckage of their childhood together might finish the work of actually becoming siblings. Julian had let her in on the project easily, and for an afternoon it felt almost peaceful, the two of them cross legged on his living room floor surrounded by yellowed photographs and folders no one had opened in years.“This one’s from a shareholder meeting,” Julian said, pulling a folder loose and flipping through it absently. “Nothing interesting. Mostly just minutes and attendance sheets.”Emma reached for a stack of correspondence instead, old letters between Richard and his lawyers, dry and dense, until one date caught her eye and made her go still.“Julian.” She held up a single page. “This is from three years ago. It references you by name. It’s addressed to Damon’s legal team.”Julian took it from her, and something passed across his fa

It was a dry cleaning ticket, of all things, that finally cracked her.Ava had asked Damon three times over two days to grab her navy blazer from the cleaners on his way home, since it sat directly between his office and the building and she’d been slammed since seven that morning with a client call that ran long, a follow up with Emma trying to smooth the latest rupture with Julian, and a strategy session about the Ferro Whitcombe fallout that had somehow spawned two more meetings by lunch.He walked in at nine without it, already mid apology.“I forgot. I got pulled into a call with legal about the audit release and it ran until eight, I’m sorry, I’ll grab it tomorrow.”“It’s fine,” Ava said, in the tone of someone for whom it was very much not fine, though the blazer itself had nothing to do with it.“You sound upset.”“I’m not upset about the blazer, Damon.” She heard her own voice come out sharper than she meant it to, the words arriving before she’d fully decided to let them. “I

The client dinner ran long, three hours of careful diplomacy over expensive steak while Halden Group’s leadership slowly talked themselves back into trusting the agency they’d nearly walked away from. By the time it wrapped, the city had gone dark and quiet in the particular way it did after ten on a weeknight, and Ava was loose limbed with the specific exhaustion of relief after sustained effort, two glasses of wine warming her further than she’d intended.“I’ll walk you,” Nathaniel said, already falling into step beside her when she turned toward home instead of hailing a cab. “It’s a nice night. And I could use the air after listening to myself talk about quarterly projections for three straight hours.”“You were good in there,” she said. “Better than good. I think we actually saved it tonight.”“We saved it. Both of us.” He glanced over at her, something warm in it. “You handled the moment when Whitfield brought up the scandal again better than I could have. Calm, no defensiveness

The calm didn’t last.It caught up with Ava that evening, hours after the kitchen conversation, while she was alone reheating leftovers and replaying his words on a loop. I almost didn’t pull back either. The line kept sharpening instead of softening, and by the time Damon walked in from a late meeting, something in her had gone from shaken to furious in a way the morning’s careful honesty hadn’t fully accounted for.“You let me apologize to you this morning like I was the only one who’d almost done something,” she said, before he’d even set his bag down. “You let me sit there feeling ashamed while you nodded along being understanding, and the whole time you were sitting on your own version of the exact same thing for three weeks.”“I told you. This morning. The second you told me yours.”“You told me after I went first.” Her voice rose, sharper than she’d let it go in months. “That’s not the same as honesty, Damon. That’s matching. You waited to see how much I’d admit before deciding