Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Kabanata 231 - Kabanata 240

Aiden's POV I'd written four versions of my vows. The first was too long. The second was too cautious, the kind of caution that sounded like a legal document, which made sense considering how much time I'd been spending with Richard lately, but wasn't appropriate for a wedding ceremony. The third was better, but it contained one sentence I knew would make Rosie give me that look she gave things that were slightly excessive. The fourth was true. That was the only standard I'd ultimately settled on. Not eloquent. Not impressive. Simply true. Dr. Garrett had told me early on that my problem wasn't that I didn't feel things. My problem was that I'd spent thirty-four years finding ways not to say them. The vows were an exercise. The most public one I'd done so far, but the same work. I stood at the back of the garden and waited. Jeffery was beside me. He'd stayed beside me for the past twenty minutes without saying much, which was his particular kind of support, the kind of supp

Rosalie's POV The house had three bedrooms, a kitchen that opened onto a porch, and a path through the dune grass that led to the beach. Lucy assessed all of it in exactly eleven minutes after we arrived and delivered her conclusions: the path to the beach required supervision for Alessandro, the middle bedroom had the best light, and the porch had two chairs that could be moved to face the water if anyone was interested. We moved the chairs. The first day was entirely about the children, which was right, expected, and perfect. Alessandro encountered sand for the first time and had feelings about it, which he communicated at length. His initial position was opposition. Sand got everywhere. Its texture was unreliable. It behaved differently depending on whether it was wet or dry, and he found that inconsistency philosophically troubling. By the afternoon, he'd revised his position to cautious tolerance, provided he could keep his hands relatively clean, which wasn't entirely pos

Aiden's POV The christening was at ten in the morning, and by 11:45, Alessandro had charmed the priest, been passed between six different people, and fallen asleep on Mrs. Willow with the expression of a man who had completed a full day's work. He hadn't cried when the water touched his head, which Lucy had confidently predicted and Jeffery had bet against, leaving him owing Lucy two dollars. She collected them in the car on the way back to the apartment, with the efficiency of someone who had been tracking the debt since the bet was made. "You shouldn't bet against me," she told Jeffery. "I'm aware of that now." "You were aware of it before. You chose to bet anyway." Jeffery handed over the two dollars. "You're eight." "Yes," Lucy said. "And I was right." Mara, beside Jeffery, looked out the window with the expression she wore when she was pretending not to find something extremely funny. The new apartment was large enough compared to the old one that it still felt s

Rosalie's POV The trip to Paris had been on the calendar for six weeks, and Lucy had been preparing for it for five and a half. She had opinions about what I should pack, which she had organized into a list and presented to me four days before we left. The list had categories. Professional items for the gallery events. Practical items for walking, because Paris required walking and bad shoes would be a problem. One item she had labeled weather contingency, a light jacket she had selected from my closet and laid out on the bed as evidence. "You've been to Paris once," I said. "I've read a lot about Paris." "That's not the same thing." "It's close enough for packing purposes." She tapped the list. "The scarf is nonnegotiable. It's a lucky scarf, and it goes with three of your outfits." The scarf in question was one she had made me buy at a market six months earlier, on the grounds that the color suited my complexion. I had worn it once. Apparently, it had now become essenti

It was a domestic scene. A woman by a window. Light came through the glass and fell across her hands, which were busy with something ordinary, sewing or folding, something that didn't require her to look at it. Instead, she was looking at the window. The light itself. Its quality. I thought about a kitchen table when I was nineteen, with art school applications I couldn't afford to send. I thought about a fire escape and a sketchbook and the evenings after Lucy fell asleep, when I painted at the kitchen table because it was the only available surface, and I painted anyway because not painting wasn't an option I knew how to choose. I thought about creating what you love with what you're given. That woman by the window had been standing in that room for three hundred years, and people passed by her, stopped, looked at the light on her hands, and felt something they couldn't always name. Someone had painted her. Someone had looked at an ordinary woman doing an ordinary thing and u