Semua Bab My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Bab 121 - Bab 130

Aiden's POV The change wasn't something I could point to precisely. It wasn't one particular moment or a specific conversation. It was more like the quality of light changing with the seasons. Gradual, then suddenly obvious. The kind of change you only notice all at once after you've been watching it happen for a while. Something had changed between us since that night when, sitting at her kitchen table, I'd told Rosie everything about Elena and told her the decision was hers. Since she'd agreed. Since she'd called me during her planning period to ask whether the real question underneath everything was something that concerned me. She looked at me differently. Over the months, I'd learned the full range of her expressions. The carefully controlled one she wore in formal settings. The exhausted one that appeared when she hadn't slept enough. The particular one she reserved for Lucy, pure love in its simplest form. The one she made when she was thinking about something she hadn

Rosalie's POV The fifteen-hundred-dollar sale happened on a Tuesday. I'd posted the painting the previous Thursday. A large canvas, bigger than anything I'd put online before. The size I'd been aiming for without fully admitting it to myself. It was a painting of a window seen from the inside, looking out over a city at night. The glass itself was visible, the way it is when you paint it honestly. It catches, distorts, and reflects the light all at once. The world outside was visible through it, but transformed simply by the act of looking through. I'd originally priced it at twelve hundred dollars, which felt ambitious. Then I'd changed it to fifteen hundred, which was either confidence or delusion, and posted it before I could talk myself out of it. It sold within thirty-six hours. I was in the art room during my lunch break when the notification came through. I read it twice. Fifteen hundred dollars, transferred and confirmed. I set my phone facedown on the desk, picked up

Rosalie's POV Jeffery told us on a Sunday night. The three of us were sitting at the kitchen table, as we'd been doing every Sunday night for the past several weeks, ever since the deal with Elena had brought the last of the crises to an end and the emergency that had consumed our home had finally begun to settle. Lucy was finishing her pasta. Jeffery was on his second glass of wine. I was looking at the canvas I'd propped against the wall to dry, wondering if the underpainting had the right temperature. Jeffery said he had to go back at the end of the month. Lucy stopped eating. She set down her fork and looked at Jeffery with the expression she wore whenever she received information she hadn't prepared for and wasn't willing to accept without examining it first. "How many days?" she asked. "About eleven," he said. "My leave is over, and I have things to take care of back home." "What things?" "My work. My apartment. And some other things." "Are there other thing

Aiden's POV The final session took place on a Wednesday afternoon. Dr. Harper had sent an official note the week before stating that the mandatory three-month co-parenting therapy period had ended and that she wanted a closing session to review the results and present her assessment to both parties. The note was professional and formal. It gave no indication of how the session itself would unfold, and I had not prepared for it nearly enough. I arrived before Rosie, as usual. I sat at my end of the couch and looked around the room I had been sitting in for three months. The bookshelves, the plants, the armchairs, the window with its particular afternoon light. On Wednesdays, it came in at a slightly different angle than it did on Thursdays, giving the room a subtly different atmosphere. I had talked to Dr. Garrett about today's session at our last appointment. He had asked how I felt about the end of the mandatory period. I had told him it felt like losing a structure I hadn't

Rosalie's POV The apartment no longer smelled like an apartment. It smelled like oil paint and turpentine, with the distinct scent of fresh gesso on canvas. The smell of a working studio. Technically, that wasn't what the apartment was supposed to be, but it was what it had become over the past three weeks. Preparing for the exhibition had consumed every available surface and most of my free time. The kitchen table was my main workspace. I had pushed the chairs against the wall so I could move around the paintings and look at them from different angles. That was how I evaluated my work, by moving instead of standing still. The easel I had bought secondhand was set up near the window for pieces that needed the afternoon light. The smaller ones were propped against the low furniture, arranged in the order I was considering for the exhibition. Ten pieces. The gallery wanted twelve, but I had told them that only ten were worth exhibiting. Ten excellent pieces were better than t