Library

Home / Romance / My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby / Kabanata 211 - Kabanata 220

Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Kabanata 211 - Kabanata 220

350 Kabanata

Chapter 211

Aiden's POV The nightmare wasn't the worst one. I'd started categorizing them now, something Dr. Garrett had suggested as a way to navigate the terrain, to know which kind was which so waking up wouldn't be completely disorienting every time. This one was manageable. Not the worst. Not the kind that left me on the floor. The kind that pulled me out quickly and loudly, my heart doing what it did, the room needing a moment to become the room again. I was sitting upright before I was fully awake. The couch. Her living room. The particular texture of the darkness here, different from my apartment, the ambient light coming in at a different angle, the sounds of a different building settling around us. I was breathing hard. I planted my feet on the floor and rested my hands on my knees, staring at the center of the room and waiting for my heart rate to do what it needed to do. There was someone in the armchair. I registered that before I registered who. A figure in the armc

Chapter 212

"Rosie." She looked up. "Thank you," I said. "Don't thank me," she said. I looked at her across the table. The low light, the late hour, the pasta between us, Alessandro asleep to the soft sounds coming from the baby monitor on the counter. "I'm going to anyway," I said. The corner of her mouth moved. "I know. You always do the things people tell you not to do." "Not always." "More often than you think," she said. "You spent three years telling yourself what you felt wasn't anything. That didn't work. "You told yourself the deployment wasn't going to change anything here. It didn't change anything here." She looked down at her plate. "You keep doing the things people told you not to do, all by yourself." I sat with that. She was right, in that particular way she was sometimes right about me, the kind of accuracy that landed in the middle of something I hadn't fully put into words yet and named it. I'd told myself things for years. This is nothing. This is mana

Chapter 213

Rosalie's POV He told me on a Sunday. Not because Sunday had any particular significance. Because Alessandro had taken a longer afternoon nap, and Lucy was at my father's, a new arrangement that had developed over the past few weeks. Those Saturday-to-Sunday visits gave my father his grandchildren and gave us a few hours of peace and quiet. The apartment was quiet in that particular way it was when Lucy wasn't there. We were at the kitchen table with coffee, and he'd been quieter than usual since morning. Not the two-in-the-morning kind of silence. A different texture. The silence of someone considering saying something. I waited. "I want to tell you about part of it," he said. I looked at him. "The deployment," he said. "Not all of it. Some of it is classified, some of it isn't mine to share, and some of it I'm not ready to say out loud yet. But there's a part of it I want you to have." "Okay," I said. He told me. He told me about the first few weeks, the opera

Chapter 214

I looked at his shirt. He did, in fact, have pasta on his shirt, from lunch. "I don't have the ring," he said. "Because it's in your nightstand, where I asked you to keep it." I stood up. He watched me walk to the bedroom. I opened the nightstand drawer. The ring box was exactly where it had been since February, the dark velvet slightly warmed from being handled. I picked it up and brought it back to the kitchen table. I stood beside him and placed it in his hand. He looked at it. Then he looked up at me. He opened the box. The ring caught the afternoon light, the same stone, the same antique band, the ring that had belonged to his mother and that I'd kept ever since that hallway at five in the morning. He held it out. Not from the floor. Without ceremony. From the kitchen table, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, with a cup of coffee between us and pasta on his shirt, Alessandro asleep in the next room, Lucy's drawings covering every wall, and the life we'd b

Chapter 215

Rosalie's POV I was engaged. I thought about it Monday morning while Alessandro was in his bouncer and Lucy was at school and Aiden was at his physical therapy appointment, which he had three times a week and attended with the disciplined consistency he brought to things he'd decided to do. I looked at the ring on my finger. It was slightly too big and caught the morning light in that particular way old, well-made things did, and I'd been looking at it roughly every four minutes since Sunday afternoon. I called Jeffery. He answered on the second ring, his voice completely ordinary. "I'm engaged," I said. The sound he made wasn't a word. It wasn't a shout, and it wasn't quite a gasp, and it wasn't exactly a laugh either. It was something that contained all three and came out as its own category. Then he said, "Finally." "He proposed at a kitchen table, with pasta on his shirt." "That is the most perfectly you-two proposal I've ever heard of," he said. "That's exact

Chapter 216

I looked at him. He looked at me. "She's going to hold me accountable," he said. "I intend to deliver." Lucy watched him write 'purple theme' with the satisfaction of someone whose process was being respected. "I want to throw flower petals," she said. "The ones people throw before the important person. I want that job." "Flower girl," I said. "I want a dress with a skirt I can spin in," she said. "The twirl test is important. If I can't spin in the dress, the dress is bad." He wrote that down. "The cake," she said. She paused for emphasis. "I have ideas." "Tell me your ideas," he said. She began. There were many ideas, all of them precise, covering the flavors and the tiers, and the important question of whether the outside should be smooth or textured, which she had strong opinions about, and whether there should be flowers on the cake and, if so, which ones, and whether they could be the same as the ones we were throwing for continuity of the theme. He wrote ev

Chapter 217

Aiden's POV The firm opened on a Wednesday in June. Without ceremony. I hadn't planned an opening event, or a ribbon, or anything that required people to stand around and greet the beginning of something. Marcus had suggested something, a lunch at the very least, and I'd said we could have lunch after the first month, when there would be something to celebrate beyond a signed lease and a website going live. He'd said that sounded exactly like me. I'd told him he wasn't wrong. The office was on the fourth floor of a building twelve blocks from Rosie's gallery, which had been a coincidence at first, and one I'd decided wasn't a reason to choose another building. Good light. Enough space. A conference room that could seat twenty and a set of individual offices that could grow with us. Marcus was already there when I arrived at seven-thirty. He looked up from the coffee he was making. "You're late," he said. "It's seven-thirty." "I've been here since six forty-five."

Chapter 218

I had a photo of Lucy on my desk. It was Rosie's work. She'd printed it, framed it, and given it to me the morning I left for my first day, saying, "This goes on your desk." I hadn't argued. It was a good photo. Lucy at the aquarium, looking at something outside the frame, her arms crossed and her head tilted at that angle that meant she was forming an opinion. In the third week, two of the newest recruits came to a morning meeting, and one of them stopped at the door to my office before coming in. "That's your daughter," he said. "Yes," I said. "How old is she?" "Seven," I said. "Going on forty." He laughed. The other man behind him laughed too. The real kind, involuntary, the kind that came out before you decided to let it. "Mine is nine," the first man said. "I know that laugh." We went into the meeting. I sat at the head of the table and looked around. Twelve people over three months. Three of them from units close to mine, men who had gone through the same ma

Chapter 219

Rosalie's POV Alessandro had developed opinions. It had happened gradually over four months, then suddenly, the way developmental changes happened, that day when you realized the gradual had accumulated into something definitive. He had opinions about being held, which he preferred to not being held, and about the specific person doing the holding. His first preference was me. That wasn't surprising. I'd been the central fact of his existence for four months, and he experienced the world from a position against my chest, near my chest, or at a reasonable distance from my chest. I was the known quantity. His second preference was Aiden. That had developed over weeks of floor visits and three a.m. feedings and the general proximity of a man who held him with the focused attention he brought to things that mattered, and who didn't speak to him in the high-pitched voice people sometimes used with babies, but in his ordinary voice, slightly lower, the voice Alessandro apparently

Chapter 220

The names she mentioned were names I'd written in a notebook when I was nineteen, sitting at the kitchen table in the first apartment, with art school applications I couldn't afford to send. Artists whose work I'd studied through library books, printed photographs, and museum visits I'd planned around train schedules. I'd written their names in the notebook the way you write down where you're trying to get when you don't yet know if you can get there. My work was being mentioned in the same context. "He is specifically interested in The Return," she said. "And he'd like to discuss the possibility of representation in the European market." I picked up my coffee. I set it back down without taking a sip. "I need a day," I said. "Take all the time you need," she said. "He's serious, and he's patient." I told Aiden that night. Alessandro was asleep and Lucy was in bed, and we were at the kitchen table, the place we ended up most evenings, the natural landing point at the end

PREV

...

...

NEXT

I-scan ang code para mabasa sa App

DMCA.com Protection Status