Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Kabanata 201 - Kabanata 210

Aiden's POV We moved from the doorway into the living room because the entryway floor wasn't a sustainable position. It took some negotiating. Lucy didn't want to loosen her grip around my neck. Alessandro didn't want to go back into the baby carrier. I was on one crutch because the other was still on the floor where it had fallen. Rosie handled the logistics of the transition with the particular competence of someone who had been managing complicated logistics alone for months, picking up the crutch from the floor and guiding us toward the couch without making it feel like she was guiding us. I sat on the floor. Not on the couch. On the floor, my back against the couch, because getting down and getting back up was easier to manage than settling onto cushions with my leg and the crutches and the particular instability of a body that had been through what mine had been through. Lucy immediately settled against my right side, her shoulder tucked beneath my arm, fitting hersel

Rosalie's POV He slept on my couch for the first two nights. Not because I'd asked him to. At the end of the first day, once Lucy was in bed and Alessandro had been fed and the apartment had gone quiet again, he simply hadn't headed for the door, and I hadn't suggested that he leave. He fell asleep on the couch before ten. I put a blanket over him and went to bed, listening to him breathe through the wall, feeling that particular relief that came from hearing a sound that had been absent for eleven weeks and was now back. He went back to his own apartment on the third day. He said he needed to check on some things, pick up some clothes, make a few calls. He said it reasonably, and I said of course, and I helped him navigate the stairs with his crutches, then watched him leave. He came back for dinner. It became our routine. He came for dinner, stayed until bedtime, then went back to his own apartment because his place was right next door and that's where his things were.

Aiden's POV Their names were Carter and Reyes. Carter had been in the unit for six years. He was from somewhere in Ohio and had this particular way of folding maps, slightly wrong according to the manual but always effective. He'd told me once, during a long stretch of waiting, that he had three kids and that the youngest had just learned to ride a bike. He'd received the video during a two-day communication window and watched it four times. Reyes was newer. Two years in the unit. Quiet, in that particular way of someone who was more capable than he needed to announce. He was twenty-eight. His wife was expecting a baby. I knew that. I'd known it before. I'd carried it with me through those eleven weeks, and now I was carrying it in my apartment on a Tuesday afternoon, unable to move from the chair I was sitting in. Not because I was injured. My leg was healing according to the timeline the surgeon had given me. Not because I was exhausted, although exhaustion was a constant

Rosalie's POV Alessandro finished nursing at 1:50 a.m. I was sitting in the nursing position I'd developed over three weeks, my back against the headboard, the lamp turned down to its lowest setting. He ate with the focused intensity he brought to everything, then went through the burping and settling process, and by two he was in that drowsy state, not quite asleep yet, that meant he'd wake up if I put him down too soon. I held him against my chest, listening to him breathe. Then I heard it through the wall. Not a loud sound. The same texture as before, muffled and brief. In the weeks since he'd come home, I'd learned that the sound had a particular quality to it, different from the ordinary noises of the building at night, different from the upstairs neighbor, the pipes, the settling of an old building. I knew that sound now. I stayed where I was for a moment. The last time, I'd sent a text. He'd said 'I'm okay' after fifteen minutes, and I'd believed the 'okay', not th

Rosalie's POV I made the decision on a Thursday morning. Not on a whim. I'd been thinking about it since the floor of his bedroom, since I'd watched Alessandro's grip slow his breathing, since I'd lain in my own bed afterward, listening to the silence through the wall. I'd thought about it for two days, and then on Thursday morning, while making coffee, I stopped thinking about it and picked up my phone. [Come over when you're up.] He knocked twenty minutes later. Still on crutches, his leg still two weeks away from being cleared for full weight-bearing. He was wearing an ordinary shirt, his hair wasn't quite in place yet, and he looked like someone who had gotten a few hours of sleep and was running on them. "Sit down," I said. He sat at the kitchen table. I set a cup of coffee in front of him. I remained standing. "I want you to move in here," I said. "For a while. Not permanently. No conditions, no set timeline. Just here, in this apartment, instead of next door."