Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Kabanata 181 - Kabanata 190

Rosalie's POV I told Jeffery on a Thursday. Not because Thursday was an important day, but because I'd been carrying the information alone for three days, and three days was about my limit for keeping something this significant to myself without telling anyone. I had carefully considered my options. My father wasn't ready yet. We were only beginning to rebuild. The phone calls, the visits, the tentative warmth of two people finding their way back to each other. That would come someday. Not yet. I trusted Mrs. Willow completely, but she was my neighbor, and the walls in this building weren't thick. The information needed to stay private until I could tell Aiden first. My agent, my new colleagues at Alcott, my teacher friends at school. None of them knew enough of the full history to understand this particular piece of it properly. Jeffery knew everything. Jeffery had been in that apartment, sitting on the floor eating takeout, when I told him I thought I was still

The gallery opened on a Saturday in March. Not the visits to Alcott, which had only been the beginning of something. This was different. This was a space with my name on the door. A signed lease. An actual key on my key ring. A room I could shape, manage, and grow. It was small. Patricia had helped me find it. A ground-floor space three blocks from Alcott, with beautiful natural light and a landlord willing to work with an emerging artist. The walls were white, the floor was concrete, and the large south-facing windows brought in perfect gallery light in the afternoons. The kind that showed the work honestly. My agent handled everything related to the business side. The legal structure, insurance, bank account, and the mountain of paperwork required by the city to operate a commercial gallery. She handled all of it efficiently, never once making me feel the weight of my inexperience in those areas. That was what good agents did. I hung twelve pieces for the open

Rosalie's POV It was a Tuesday. I was at the gallery, in the back office, checking inventory when my phone vibrated once. I looked at it. A news alert. I read the headline and set the phone facedown on the table, then went back to the inventory. It vibrated again. Then again. Then the little radio I kept in the back office for company, the one tuned to the station that played music in the mornings and gave the news on the hour, switched from music to a breaking-news bulletin. I froze. The reporter chose his words carefully. The language was measured. A special operations team, in an undisclosed location. Missing in action. The circumstances could not be confirmed at this time. No names had been released. Families would be notified through official channels. I listened. Then I listened to the next report, from another station whose alerts were coming through on my phone. This one was less careful. A young reporter was reading from a story that had

She thought about that. "Me neither," she said. "Because he promised he'd teach me how to swim this summer. He doesn't break his promises." I looked at her. Seven years old. Brown eyes. That certainty. That particular logic of a child who had spent nine months measuring one person's reliability and had reached a conclusion she refused to revise without better evidence than a news report. "You're right," I said. "He doesn't break his promises." She picked up her fork and went back to her dinner. I wrote it in my journal that night. I wrote a lot. Not just in my journal, but also the creative writing I sometimes used to process things, although some of that ended up in the journal too. The journal was mostly factual. A record of the days. What happened. What Lucy said. What I created. What I sold. How I was doing. I wrote down Lucy's reasoning about the swimming promise. I read it twice. Then I closed the journal and went to sit at the kitchen table. The gallery

It was not a distressed frown, but a serious one. The frown of someone who had just been placed in front of a new situation and was already beginning to form an opinion about it. I recognized that frown. I'd seen it across kitchen tables and therapy couches, in that particular way he looked at things he was evaluating before he'd even decided what he thought about them. My son had his father's frown at three minutes old. He had a dark curl on his forehead, one perfect curl, and his skin was warm against my chest, and his weight was real, precise, present in a way that suddenly crystallized the last few months into this. All that waiting. All that building. Those forty percent of fear and sixty percent of certainty. All of it had led here. To this precise weight against my chest. To this frown. I held him. Jeffery stood by the wall with his arms crossed, his jaw doing something that suggested he was carefully keeping himself together. He'd been very composed