Início / Romance / My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby / Capítulo 161 - Capítulo 170

Todos os capítulos de My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Capítulo 161 - Capítulo 170

350 Capítulos

Chapter 161

He nodded. The nod of a man who had expected that answer, wasn't surprised by it, and wasn't going to challenge it. He had enough experience in this field to know the difference between someone who was giving something up and someone who was moving toward something, and he knew me well enough to understand which one I was. "Then you leave with honor," he said. He stood and extended his hand. I shook it. The handshake that marked the conclusion of a story rather than its interruption. A chapter closed, not left unfinished. I walked out of the administrative building, crossed the parking lot, and got into my car. I sat there for a moment. The commendation was on the passenger seat. I looked at it without picking it up. I thought about the years I'd spent in military service, what they'd given me and what they'd cost me, and I wondered whether, in the end, the result had truly been worth it. I thought about a forward operating base and sounds coming through walls that

Chapter 162

Rosalie's POV I called my father back on a Saturday morning. Lucy was at the kitchen table eating breakfast, and I went into the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and dialed the number before I had time to think too much. It was the only way I'd found to do what needed to be done. He answered on the second ring. We talked for twenty minutes. Mostly practical things. His address, which I had a vague idea of thanks to Jeffery, but not the details. The distance: four hours by car, farther than I'd imagined and closer, too. When I could come, a decision he left entirely up to me, with the same patience he'd shown since our first call. I said December, before Christmas. He said whenever the time was right for me. I told Aiden that evening. He was at the apartment to pick her up, and stayed for dinner to eat the chicken Lucy had requested, then for a quiet walk on the fire escape after she fell asleep. I told him while we drank tea outside, the city stretching out below us

Chapter 163

He was standing on the porch. I saw him before the car stopped. He had aged. Of course he'd aged. Seven years had passed, but I still had to make myself understand the fact. More gray than I remembered. He still had the broad shoulders of a military man, the posture that remained straight, but there was a different stillness to him now, different from my father's quiet authority. This was the stillness of a man who had learned how to wait. When the car stopped, I got out. He came down from the porch. I went to him. It was like being twelve again. Not in a painful way. More like how some things remain etched into the body rather than the memory: the particular sensation of being held by a particular person, his scent, his reassuring presence, those arms that had always meant safety. I'd been twenty-six for months. In his arms, I was also twelve, then nineteen, and every age in between. He held me for a long time. When he pulled back, his eyes were wet. He wasn't a man wh

Chapter 164

Aiden's POV We left at nine. Lucy had made it through dinner, which my father had prepared with the careful attention of someone who had been cooking for one person for a long time and wasn't used to cooking for more. He had made something simple and good, and Lucy had eaten everything while asking questions about the photographs on the walls. My father answered each one with the patience of a man receiving an unexpected gift and handling it carefully. He walked us to the car. He crouched down to Lucy's height and told her he was glad she'd come. She told him that she thought Sergeant was a very well-balanced dog and that he should be proud of him. He said he'd tell Sergeant she'd said that. She approved and got into the car. My father shook my hand again by the car door. A brief handshake, like the one before. The gesture of an ongoing relationship rather than a resolved situation. That was fine with me. I'd learned to live with things that were still becoming instead

Chapter 165

Rosalie's POV He knocked on the door on a Saturday at six in the evening. Lucy was at Mrs. Willow's, which he knew because we'd talked that morning about the day's plans and I'd mentioned it without realizing, until he showed up at my door, that he'd remembered the information for a reason. I was wearing my painting clothes. It wasn't strategic. I'd been working since noon on the piece for the second Alcott exhibition, the big one I was struggling with, the one that kept taking on a slightly different shape from what I was trying to achieve. I'd been so absorbed that I hadn't noticed the time passing until someone knocked on my door. I opened it. He was holding a flower. One flower. Not roses. That would have been too symbolic, too loaded with everything roses had come to represent. This was something else. A single stem with a small cluster of white flowers whose name I didn't know, simple and understated, the kind of flower you bought because you liked it rather than be

Chapter 166

He looked at me with a laugh, and something stilled on his face. "I've never," he said, "been on a date with someone I've been in love with for eight years." I stopped laughing. I looked at him. He said it the way he had in the clinic waiting room, when Lucy had pointed out that they had the same eyes. Like a fact he had accepted and was simply stating without embellishment, without a preamble. Just the raw truth, offered across a restaurant table. Eight years. I did the quick calculation even though I already knew the answer. He was thirty-four. Eight years ago, he had been twenty-six and I had been eighteen. At eighteen, I was the girl who had tripped over her own feet when he walked into my father's house, and I'd spent the next three years pretending, with very little success, that I was someone different. He had known since he was twenty-six. He had realized it at twenty-six and spent three years convincing himself it was nothing, which was exactly what he'd told m

Chapter 167

Rosalie's POV The restaurant had grown quieter around us. I noticed after about three hours. The background noise had faded, the tables around us were emptying as the evening went on, and we were still there, with the remains of dinner, glasses of water that had been refilled twice, and a conversation that hadn't found a natural stopping point. We talked about his business. Not the official version I'd heard during legal proceedings or custody discussions. The real version. What it had been like at the beginning, what it had become, and the particular satisfaction he found in working with veterans. He didn't describe it in the language of mission or purpose, the way people sometimes talked about a job well done. He used the gentler words of someone who had finally found a place where his abilities and the things that truly mattered to him came together. He asked me about the gallery. Not the previous exhibition, but the next one, my plans, what I wanted to accomplish with my

Chapter 168

"What did you do?" he asked. "I called my landlord," I said. "At two in the morning. Crying. Because I'd signed a lease that prohibited pets, and I now had four cats, three of whom were only a few hours old, and I had no idea what to do." "What did the landlord do?" he asked. "He came over," I said. "At two in the morning. He was sixty years old. He sat on the floor of my bathroom and helped me figure out what to do. He never said a word about the lease." I paused. "He also helped me find foster homes for the kittens six weeks later, and he never reported the cat. He simply never mentioned it." Aiden laughed. It was a real laugh, open and spontaneous, the kind that came from somewhere deep inside rather than the polite laughs people used to show that they'd found something amusing. I'd heard him laugh before, but usually it was restrained, a brief exhale of satisfaction. This was different. I loved it too much. I was aware that I liked it far too much, and I did nothing

Chapter 169

Aiden's POV I was falling, and I had already fallen. This wasn't new. I had been doing it for years, managing the situation carefully, maintaining a strategic distance, and convincing myself for seven years that the management and distance were for her sake when they had really been for mine. The fall had never stopped. It had simply happened at a distance that allowed both of us to keep functioning. There was no longer any possibility of retreat. I didn't tell her that. She continued to measure everything, carefully and precisely, with the particular attentiveness of someone who, having been given bad information, had questioned everything ever since. I could watch her measuring. I saw those moments when she felt something, then stopped and confronted it with her own awareness, making sure it was real before allowing herself to surrender to it. I respected that. I was the reason she'd needed to measure things in the first place. The least I could do was give her al

Chapter 170

"I'm glad you live here now," she said. No transition, no preamble. Just that one sentence slipped between two crackers. I looked down at my coffee. "I'm glad too," I said. She looked at me with the brown eyes that were mine, set in her face. "Mom's happy too," she said. "Even if it takes her a while to say what she's thinking." I said nothing. "She's getting better," Lucy said, in the tone of someone delivering a report. "Before, she never said anything about the important things. Now she says some of them. Slowly." She thought about it. "I think she's practicing." "She's doing very well," I said. "I know," Lucy said. "I told her that." I looked at the table. "Did she say anything?" "She said thank you in the voice she uses when something means more to her than she lets on." Lucy ate another cracker. "I know that voice." I thought about Rosie's voices. The one she had mastered, her real voice, and the one in between that she used when something had made it past

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