All Chapters of Can’t Stay Away From My Best Friend’s Billionaire Brother: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Ava went to Damon’s office two days later, the Halden fallout finally settled enough that she could think past the immediate emergency for the first time all week. She hadn’t planned to have this conversation there, in the same room where she’d once walked in on Vivienne’s hand pressed flat against his chest, but it was where he was, and she was too tired to wait for a better setting.“I need you to fix this,” she said, closing the door behind her. “Not contain it. Fix it. I need Julian dealt with, permanently, in whatever way actually stops this instead of just managing the next leak after this one.”Damon looked up from his desk, and something in his face told her, before he even said it, that he didn’t have what she was asking for. “I can’t do that without proof. Right now all I have is a strong suspicion and a pattern that fits. If I move against him publicly without evidence, on the heels of everything we just went through to reintegrate him, it undoes a year of work rebuilding t

Her boss called her in on a Thursday morning, and the moment Ava saw his face through the glass wall of his office, she knew this wasn’t going to be another version of contained.“I need to be straight with you,” he said, once she’d closed the door. “Halden’s staying. The Meridian Cross documentation held up, the story mostly burned out. But two other clients raised concerns this week. Nothing official. Just questions about whether the agency’s judgment is compromised by how much personal drama keeps intersecting with the account. I fought for you. I meant what I said last time, that I don’t think you did anything wrong. But I’m one person, and the partners are starting to ask questions I can’t keep answering with your track record alone.”“What are you telling me.”“I’m telling you I don’t have a formal action to take. I’m telling you that if this happens a fourth time, I might not have a choice about it.” He said it gently, which somehow made it worse than if he’d been harsh. “You’r

The email from Nathaniel arrived four days later, formal in subject line but warmer once she opened it, the kind of message that had clearly been drafted and redrafted before he let himself send it.“I heard about the resignation through the grapevine, and I’m sorry it came to that. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you had another good option left. I wanted to reach out because a position just opened on my team here in London, leading brand strategy for our expanding client roster. No connection to the Blackwood accounts, no overlap with anything from the last year. It would mean relocating, at least for a while. I understand if that’s the last thing you want right now, but I’d rather you hear the offer from me directly than not hear it at all.”Ava read it three times, sitting at her kitchen table with the box from her old office still only half unpacked in the corner.She hadn’t been looking. She hadn’t updated a resume or reached out to a single contact in the four days since she

Emma came over the next evening carrying takeout instead of wine this time, a small, deliberate shift Ava noticed and appreciated, the two of them settling onto the couch with cartons of noodles between them like they had a hundred times before, back when their problems were smaller and entirely their own."You've decided," Emma said, before Ava had said a word. "I can tell. You've got the same look you had right before you told my father off in his own driveway."Ava laughed despite herself. "I haven't officially decided anything.""But you're leaning.""I'm leaning." Ava set down her chopsticks, turning the truth over one more time before she said it out loud, testing its weight. "I think I'm going to take it, Emma. Not forever, maybe. Maybe a year, maybe longer, I don't actually know yet. But I need to build something that isn't shaped by proximity to your family's chaos before I can trust that anything I build afterward is real."Emma was quiet for a moment, and Ava braced herself

Ava's apartment was mostly boxes by the time Damon came over, the London flight booked for two weeks out, most of her life folded into cardboard with the brisk efficiency of someone who had learned, over the last year and a half, exactly how quickly a life could need to be packed up and moved.She let him in, and he stood in the doorway for a moment taking in the half-emptied rooms, the bare walls where photographs had hung, and something moved across his face that he didn't try to hide."I wanted to see you before you left," he said. "Not to change your mind. I meant what I said. I just didn't want the last time I saw you in this apartment to be over the phone.""I'm glad you came." She gestured him toward the one chair that wasn't currently buried under folded clothes, and sat down herself on the arm of the couch, the same spot she'd been sitting when he showed up at midnight weeks earlier to tell her the last two weeks had felt wrong."How are you feeling about it," he asked. "Real