All Chapters of My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Rosalie's POV The message from my coworker came on a Thursday morning during my planning period. Sarah taught third grade, and her classroom was two doors down from the art room. She sent me a screenshot without a single word attached. That was completely unlike her. She always included context, usually with a comment of her own. The silence before the image was a warning all by itself. I looked at the screenshot. It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at. It was a social media account. The profile picture was blurry. The username was a string of words I recognized. My name. My real name. Not the one I used at school, but my actual last name, paired with words that formed a question. The first post on the account was a photograph. It was me standing at the window of my apartment. I recognized the window by the pale blue curtains and the angle of the fire escape railing visible along the left side. I was standing there looking outside. I had no idea someone w

Aiden's POV The investigator called on Monday morning with the IP address. I was sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the Delacroix contract Marcus was supposed to pick up on Wednesday. The moment I saw the incoming call, I set the paperwork aside. I never touched it again that day. The deleted account had been created from a specific device at a specific location. My investigator had a contact inside the social media platform, someone who owed him a professional favor. Just before the account was permanently deleted, that contact retrieved the account's creation metadata. The IP address led them to a hotel six blocks from Rosie's apartment building. Not Elena's hotel. A different one. Smaller. The kind of place that didn't have the Grandview's security infrastructure. The kind where you could pay cash for a room and walk through the lobby without passing three different security cameras. She'd been six blocks away when she created the account. He

Rosalie's POV I borrowed Sarah's blazer on Monday. She'd offered it without my even asking, which meant she'd seen me staring at my clothes and understood the problem before I'd said a word. It was a beautiful charcoal-gray blazer, impeccably tailored, the kind of piece that instantly gave someone credibility and authority in a room where important decisions were made. I didn't own anything like it. My wardrobe consisted of teacher clothes, paint-stained tops, and the green dress I'd worn to the art show. Nothing suitable for a courtroom. I picked it up from her classroom Monday afternoon, hung it on the back of my bedroom door, and found myself looking at it while I finished preparing my lesson plans. Tuesday morning, I put it on and stood in front of my bathroom mirror. I looked like someone trying very hard to look like she belonged. I pinned my hair up. I wore my nicest pair of small earrings. I made Lucy breakfast, helped her get dressed for school, and dropp

Aiden's POV Richard put a hand on my arm before I'd taken three steps into the parking lot. "Give her a minute," he said. I stopped. I knew he was right. I knew it the way I knew most things I refused to accept, with immediate, absolute certainty. Rosie needed to be alone in that car. She needed those eleven minutes, or however long it took, without having to deal with my presence on top of everything else she'd already been forced to endure. I stood at the top of the courthouse steps, watching her car from a distance. The engine was off. Through the windshield I could make out her profile, her silhouette, her hands resting on the steering wheel, her head bowed slightly forward. She wasn't falling apart. There was nothing dramatic about it. She was simply a woman sitting alone in her car, crushed by the weight of what had just happened in that courtroom, left speechless by the injustice of it. Richard was talking beside me. He was explaining the process fo

Rosalie's POV I quit on a Wednesday. I'd been thinking about it for two weeks, ever since the morning after the hearing, when I'd woken up at five-thirty after barely four hours of sleep. I'd lain there in the dark, going over my finances for what had to be the fortieth time, always arriving at the same conclusion. Without the income from the hotel, the numbers didn't work. And I no longer knew what to do. The truth was, they hadn't worked in a long time. I'd simply been covering the shortfall well enough to keep myself from falling over the edge. The hearing had broken something inside me. Not my finances. Those hadn't changed. It was my ability to keep everything together that cracked that day, after sitting in that borrowed blazer listening to fabricated lies delivered in polished legal language. I was running on reserves. The kind you tap into when there's nothing left but sheer determination. And even that reserve had its limits. I was reaching them.