All Chapters of My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Chapter 321 - Chapter 330

Aiden's POV I found it on a Thursday morning. She'd been in the studio since six. I'd gotten the kids up and made breakfast and settled Alessandro with my father-in-law, who was visiting for the week, and sent Lucy off to school. Then I'd come back to clear the kitchen table, and the journal was there. Open. She did that sometimes. She'd write something down and then have to stop in the middle of a thought to deal with whatever needed dealing with, and the journal would stay where she'd left it, open to the last entry. I was stacking plates. I saw my name. I stopped. I didn't read the whole entry. I read the lines my eyes landed on before I even realized I was reading them. He stayed. Every time I expected him to leave the way people leave, the way I'd trained myself to expect, he stayed. I'm still learning to believe it. He stayed. I set down the plates. I looked at the journal for a moment. Then I closed it carefully, the way she'd left it, with the pen inside as

Rosalie's POV It was a Tuesday in August. I was eight months pregnant, and the back office of the gallery was about four degrees too warm because the air conditioner on that side of the building had been doing something erratic all summer, something building management kept promising to fix. I had a fan on my desk. I was going through the backlog of correspondence that piled up whenever I spent time in the studio and let things accumulate, which I did regularly, and Delia tolerated it with that particular patience of someone who had developed a system for dealing with the backlog and trusted the system. I went through the emails in the order Delia had flagged them. Logistics. Commission correspondence. A Toronto gallery wanting to discuss a future exhibition. Two journalists with questions about the museum exhibition. An invoice that needed approval. Then there was one Delia had marked with a single asterisk, her system for things that required my full attention. The sender w

Aiden's POV I was in a meeting when she called. Not a critical meeting. A project review with three people who could continue without me. I saw her name on the screen, held up one finger to the room, stepped into the hallway, and answered. The first sound told me something was wrong. "Are you okay?" I said. Then she started talking, and I realized it wasn't bad. It was the opposite of bad, in that particular way the opposite of bad could still make someone cry. I stood in the hallway outside the conference room and listened to her tell me about the email and the museum and the curator whose writing she'd read and the textbook at the library when she was nineteen. I listened to all of it. I didn't interrupt. When she finished, I said, "You knew this was going to happen." "You don't get to say that." "I'm going to say it anyway." "Aiden." "You knew this was going to happen," I said. "Not exactly this. But you knew the work was going to be seen. You've always known."

Rosalie's POV She arrived on a Thursday evening at 6:47 p.m. Not early. Not late. Exactly when she had decided to arrive, which seemed consistent with everything pregnancy had suggested about her character. The labor was shorter than the previous two, which Dr. Oswell said was common with a third child, though she also said common did not mean guaranteed, and by that point, I had learned to hold medical probabilities lightly. It was shorter, and it was not easy, and there was a period somewhere in the middle when the room narrowed down to the precise, immediate work of getting through the next step, and Aiden was there for all of it, in the room, present in the way he had been present throughout Mila's pregnancy, without drama and without absence. He had been in the room from the beginning. He was in the room at 6:47 p.m. when she arrived. Dr. Oswell placed her in my arms. She was small in that particular way of being compact rather than fragile. Dark, already-present c

Aiden's POV I held her at nine fifteen, after the family had left. Not because I had been waiting. I had been in the room the entire time, present for every moment of that Thursday evening, but the evening had required a particular order of things, and that order meant Rosie held Mila first, then Lucy, then Colonel Russo, then Alessandro, briefly, with Rosie's help, his little hands guided by hers. By nine o'clock, the children were with Mrs. Willow, back at the apartment. Colonel Russo had gone to the hotel down the street with a promise to return in the morning. The room had settled into its nighttime quiet, the monitors making their regular readings, the nurse making her rounds. Rosie was resting. Not asleep. That particular state that came after significant physical exertion, when the body was finished but the mind was still working, that half-rest of someone processing what had just happened. Mila was in the hospital bassinet beside the bed. I sat in the chair and wa