All Chapters of My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

It wasn't enough to replace my shifts at the hotel. But it was gaining momentum. That was what I kept coming back to. It was still small, but it was growing in a direction that felt real, not accidental. I sat on the fire escape with my phone in hand, scrolling through my account, reading messages from people who wanted to know more about my upcoming paintings, and watching the steady trickle of new followers who actually stuck around instead of simply passing through. That's when Aiden called. The fire escape had become my refuge at night. The kitchen was where I worked. The bedroom was where I went to sleep badly. The fire escape came alive during that part of the evening when I needed to get beyond the walls of the apartment without actually leaving. I answered. "How are you doing?" he asked. "I quit my job at the hotel today," I said. Silence settled between us. "Why?" "Because I forgot a meeting with some parents, mixed up two students' files, and I'm exhausted. I

I looked at the painting. He'd been watching my account since the day he'd found me. He'd seen everything. Every piece I'd created at night while Lucy was at his place. Everything I'd shaped in the quiet and the absence. Every emotion I'd poured into paint because I had nowhere else to put it. He'd seen it all. "This painting is about you," I said. My voice was steady. I hadn't decided to say it. It simply came out because it was true. I had the proof right in front of me, and there was no version of this moment in which I could pretend otherwise. "I know," he said. "The figure in the doorway. That's what you looked like when I imagined you coming back. Before I stopped imagining it." I paused. "I didn't know that's what I was painting until it was finished." "I know," he repeated softly. "I knew when I saw it." I turned around. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed on me. It was the look I'd cataloged for months. The one I'd seen in therapy, at

I grew up watching what happened when that need took over. I told Rosie about the sounds I'd learned to decipher through her bedroom door. The strip of yellow light across the floor. That particular silence my mother had perfected, that learned absence of reaction that had become a form of survival for her. I told her about the decision I'd made at some point, I couldn't say exactly how old I was, that I would never become like him. That if I wanted to avoid becoming like my father, I could never need anyone the way he needed people. That if I kept people at a reasonable distance, close enough to feel their warmth but far enough away that the need could never become dangerous, I'd never turn into what I'd watched him become. I'd maintained that distance throughout my entire adult life. Then, home on leave, I'd found a dark-haired girl playing with the light on the curtains at the kitchen table. I'd kept my distance for eight years, unsuccessfully, because she'd already gotten i

As if I'd handed him something sharp and he'd taken it without setting it down. "You're the most unforgettable person I've ever met," he said. His voice was calm. Deliberately calm, the result of carefully choosing every word. "I spent seven years destroying myself trying to forget you," he said. "I couldn't do it. I tried. I did everything I could to make it happen. I went through every part of my life, looking for somewhere you didn't exist, but there wasn't one." He held my gaze. "Not because I'd decided to hold on. Because you were already there, and trying to erase you only showed me exactly where you were." I looked at him. "I know that now," I said. "Good." "That doesn't erase what it did to me," I said. "Knowing it now. What you felt doesn't change what I heard in that guest room. It doesn't change what I believed about myself for seven years because of your words." "I know," he said. "I need you to really know that. Not just say it." "I know," he said. "I k

But this teaching job was my last anchor. I'd already lost all my shifts at the hotel. My painting income was growing, but it was still unstable. If the investigation went badly, if someone in the district believed the false testimony, if the complaint gained enough momentum to become irreversible, I could lose not only this job but also the chance to teach anywhere in the district. I stayed in the car. I didn't call Aiden. That was the first thing I noticed. The fact that I didn't call Aiden. Over the past few months, whenever something went wrong, I'd called him, or he already knew, or we were in the same room when the problem happened. He was the person I'd turned to when things got difficult, and I hadn't really realized it until that exact moment, sitting on a residential street with my phone in my hand and not calling him. I wasn't ready. Not yet. Not until I'd said it out loud to someone else and heard my own voice say it before showing it to him. I called Jeffery. H