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Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Kabanata 221 - Kabanata 230

350 Kabanata

Chapter 221

Rosalie's POV Jeffery called on a Thursday to say he was bringing someone to dinner on Saturday. He said it casually, the way Jeffery said things that weren't actually casual, that easy, practiced delivery he used when something mattered more than he wanted to let on. "Someone," I said. "A person," he said. "A woman. Her name is Mara." I waited. "She's a marine biologist," he said. "We met at a fundraiser. Three months ago." Three months. Jeffery had been mentioning this person for three months without mentioning this person, a very specific behavior from someone who was protecting something new from too much attention before he was sure of it himself. "Bring her Saturday," I said. "That's what I'm doing," he said. "I just told you." "I know," I said. "I'm telling you I want to meet her." A pause. "Be normal," he said. "I'm always normal." "You're never normal," he said. "You're a lot of things. Normal isn't one of them. I mean, don't evaluate her the way yo

Chapter 222

Rosalie's POV Rosalie's POV He'd been building toward something all evening. I could tell. That slight air of someone holding onto a piece of information, waiting for the right moment to share it. He wasn't exactly nervous. Just thoughtful. Lucy was eating her cake with complete concentration. Alessandro had been transferred into Aiden's arms. Jeffery set down his fork. "I'm thinking about transferring," he said. The table went quiet in that particular way tables did when something important had just been said. "Closer to the city," he said. "There's an opening at a firm here, and it's a lateral move career-wise, but it's the right direction for where I want to be." He looked at me as he said it. "Mara's research center is thirty minutes from here. It's the right time to make the move." I looked at him. My brother. The one who'd driven four hours to find me when I'd disappeared. Who'd been in my hospital room when Lucy was born, and on my couch when I was pregnant

Chapter 223

Aiden's POV I kept going to therapy. Every Thursday at ten. I hadn't missed a single session since coming home, which was different from before the deployment, when I'd gone regularly, and different from the years before that, when I hadn't gone at all. That consistency was a thing in itself, the choice to keep showing up even after the acute crisis had passed. Dr. Garrett noted it one Thursday in July. "You haven't canceled," he said. "No," I said. "A lot of people do," he said. "When things stabilize. When the acute phase is over. The sessions start to feel less necessary, and other things fill the time." I looked at the window. "I stopped before," I said. "When things got better. After the first difficult return, the one before the deployment. I went for three months, then things seemed manageable, and I stopped." I paused. "That's how I ended up spending seven years alone, unable to explain why." Dr. Garrett was silent for a moment. "That's an important realizat

Chapter 224

"Give me an example." "Two weeks ago," I said. "A difficult morning. She asked me how I was doing, and the first thing that formed in my mouth was I'm fine." I paused. "I didn't say it. I said, 'The guilt is strong today.' That's all I said. She said okay, handed me a coffee, and sat down at the table." "And?" "And nothing," I said. "It was simply true. And she received it without reacting in a way that required me to manage her reaction. Then we had breakfast." Dr. Garrett was quiet for a moment. "Tell me about Rosie," he said. I looked at him. "In your own words," he said. "Not the situation. Her." I sat with that for a moment. "She's the most emotionally intelligent person I know," I said. "I don't mean she's always comfortable with emotions. She avoided them for years. So did I. But she has this ability to understand what's happening in a room, in a person, beneath the surface of what's being said." I looked at the window. "She knew I was on the floor before she

Chapter 225

Rosalie's POV I got home at five-thirty. His text had been sitting on my phone since I left the gallery, the kind of text that wasn't urgent and therefore more unsettling than urgent texts, because it left room for imagination to work. Not urgent. Just something I should have told you in those words a long time ago. I'd been curious all afternoon, the way someone was when they'd been given a piece of information and couldn't quite let it go. Alessandro was already home, picked up from Mrs. Willow's by Aiden at four, and he was in the bouncer in the living room. Lucy was doing her homework at the kitchen table. Aiden was on the couch with a firm report he was annotating. He looked up when I came in. I looked at him. "That thing you wanted to tell me," I said. "After dinner. Lucy should be in bed." Lucy looked up from her homework with the expression she wore when she suspected she was being left out of information. "I'm going to bed very early tonight," she said. "If

Chapter 226

"You were holding him, trying everything, and nothing was working, and I could see you starting to go toward that quiet, hard place." I paused. "You know what I'm talking about. The place you go when you're overwhelmed and your instinct is to shut down." "Yes," he said softly. "You caught yourself. You recognized where you were headed and stopped. You handed me Alessandro and said, 'I need five minutes.' And you took five minutes and came back." He was looking at the table. "That's not nothing," I said. "That's huge. That's a man who watched his father go to that quiet, hard place and never come back, catching the same instinct in himself and redirecting it. With a four-month-old baby at five in the morning." He was silent. "And the apology to Lucy last month," I said. "When you were short with her about the puzzle pieces. You apologized before she'd even finished processing what had happened. Not as a performance. No explanation or justification. Just, 'I was short with yo

Chapter 227

Rosalie's POV The morning after the conversation at the kitchen table, I woke up thinking about weddings. Not the way I'd thought about them at nineteen, when what I was really thinking about was being chosen. Standing in front of people and having someone point to me: There she is. She matters to someone. I'd wanted that at nineteen, in that particular way of a girl who had felt invisible for years, and I hadn't known until recently that what I really wanted was proof. External proof, the kind you could point to, proving you were worth something to someone. I didn't need that anymore. I lay there for a few minutes while Alessandro made his waking noises from the nursery, and I thought about what I actually wanted. Not what a wedding was supposed to be. What I wanted. The answer came quickly and without drama. I wanted a ceremony. That particular gravity of standing somewhere with the people who had been there for the difficult moments and saying out loud: We built this. Lo

Chapter 228

Aiden's POVRichard had warned me the meeting would take about an hour.It lasted forty minutes because Lucy had already done her research.I discovered this when the child's guardian ad litem, a calm woman named Patricia who clearly spent most of her professional life explaining complicated things to children, sat across from Lucy in the conference room and began her prepared explanation of what adoption meant, legally, procedurally, and in terms of rights and responsibilities. She was on her second sentence when Lucy said, politely but without the slightest hesitation, that she had already read about the process and understood the general framework, but she still had a few specific questions, if that was okay.Patricia looked at her for a moment.Then she looked at me.Then she looked back at Lucy."Of course," she said.Lucy's questions were good. Better than good. She asked what happened to her current legal name. She asked whether the adoption legally affected her relati

Chapter 229

Rosalie's POV My father arrived at seven in the morning with flowers wrapped in newspaper and a container of something he'd cooked the night before, which he put in the refrigerator without explanation. He stood in my kitchen, looking around the apartment the way he always did now, taking inventory, reassuring himself that what he saw was real. That I was here. That all of this was here. He did it every time he visited, and I'd stopped finding it difficult to watch. "Sit down," I said. "The coffee's ready." He sat. I poured. Alessandro was still in his crib, and the apartment was quiet in that particular morning way, the way it was only until Lucy woke up and organized the day according to her own priorities. My father wrapped both hands around his cup. He looked at the flowers he'd placed on the table, the ones from his garden, dahlias and something yellow whose name I didn't know, and said, "Your mother grew dahlias." I looked up from the counter. He wasn't looking at m

Chapter 230

The flowers were on the dresser. The dahlias and the yellow thing. She would've had opinions about which ones to cut. I kept my eyes on the ceiling when I needed to and didn't ruin my mascara. By eleven, the garden was ready. I knew because Lucy appeared in the doorway in her dress, the one she'd chosen herself, very formal, very proper, holding her petal basket with the seriousness of someone about to perform a critical function. "It looks good," she said. "Mrs. Willow has Alessandro. Jeffery is downstairs. Mara looks very good." A pause. "Dad is in the back. He's been standing there for a while." "Is he okay?" "He looks like he's thinking." She tilted her head. "He's doing that thing where his face goes still when he's feeling something big. You know the one." I knew the one. My father appeared behind her. He'd put on the suit he'd brought, the good one, the one he'd worn to Alessandro's christening, and he was holding the flowers he'd brought from his garden, the dah

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