All Chapters of Secret Relationship with my Brother’s best friend : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

33 Chapters

Moving In

JADEThe penthouse doesn’t feel like mine for the first two weeks. I keep waiting for someone to tell me I don’t belong here, in these rooms with their floor-to-ceiling windows and their furniture that costs more than my degree, in this bed that used to be just his and is somehow now also, unbelievably, a little bit mine.I bring over exactly four boxes. Clothes, my camera equipment, a shelf of film theory textbooks Derek makes fun of and then reads anyway when he thinks I’m not looking, and a framed photo of Marcus and me at sixteen that I can’t decide whether to put out or hide in a drawer.I put it out. Derek doesn’t say anything about it. He just moves it once, very slightly, so the afternoon light doesn’t wash it out, and I love him a little more for noticing that without being told.The first week is strange in small, specific ways. I don’t know where he keeps the coffee filters. He doesn’t know I hate the smell of his sandalwood soap in large doses, that it gives me a headache

Last Updated : 2026-08-03

Ordinary days

JADEThere’s a version of happiness nobody prepares you for — the boring kind. The kind that doesn’t look like anything in the movies, no grand gestures, no music swelling, just a Tuesday where Derek makes eggs badly on purpose because he knows it makes me laugh, burning them slightly every single time despite having access to a stove worth more than a used car, and I finish editing my senior thesis project on the couch with my feet in his lap while he reads quarterly reports and occasionally reads a sentence out loud just to hear himself say something ridiculous like “shareholder value” in the same voice he uses to call me bean sprout.I finish my degree that semester. Graduate with honors I only half believe I earned, given how much of the last year I spent distracted by a six-foot-three problem in a tailored suit who used to call me names across a rainy parking lot. Derek comes to the ceremony. Sits in the third row next to Nina and Lauren, because Marcus’s seat stays empty, an abs

Last Updated : 2026-08-17

What Japan took

I tell her about my mother for the first time on a quiet Sunday, unprompted, apropos of nothing except that she asks, gently, why I still flinch sometimes at raised voices, and I decide, for once, not to deflect.“Her name was Elena,” I say. “She was American. My father met her at a conference in New York when he was twenty-six, and by every account I’ve ever heard, it was fast and real and nothing like the arrangement he tried to make for me. They were happy, for a while. I remember being happy, before everything.”“What happened?”“He happened, eventually. The company grew. He started treating home like an extension of the business — measuring my mother’s worth in how well she represented the family at events, measuring mine in grades and discipline instead of anything softer. She tried to fight it for years. I remember them arguing at night, through the walls, her voice getting smaller every year instead of louder, until one day it just stopped entirely. She packed one suitcase. Le

Last Updated : 2026-08-19

The Board

JADEDerek invites me to a company holiday party in December, the first time he’s ever brought me into that specific part of his world, and I spend an embarrassing amount of time deciding what to wear for an event I’m assured is “casual” by a man whose idea of casual still involves a blazer that costs more than my monthly rent.His board is exactly what I expect and somehow also nothing like it — older men in expensive suits who size me up in the first thirty seconds the way people size up any unexpected variable, and then, one by one, warm considerably once they see the way Derek’s whole posture changes when I’m standing next to him.Priya finds me by the bar within the first twenty minutes, sharp-eyed and clearly protective of her boss in a way I respect immediately. “So you’re the reason he leaves by six now,” she says, not quite a question.“Is that a complaint?”“God, no.” She laughs, surprised into it. “It’s the best thing that’s happened to this office in six years. He used to

Last Updated : 2026-08-27

The Weekend Away

JADEDerek surprises me with a weekend upstate in October, a rented cabin near a lake that’s gone the specific gold color that only lasts about ten days a year, and for two full days I forget entirely that either of us has a life outside these particular forty-eight hours.We hike badly. He’s better at it than I am, obviously, because he’s the kind of man who probably ran marathons in his twenties out of some misplaced sense of discipline, but he slows his pace without making it obvious, walks half a step behind me on the narrow parts of the trail so I never notice he’s doing it on purpose. We cook dinner together in a kitchen too small for both of us, bump elbows, argue about garlic, and I catch him watching me chop vegetables with an expression so soft it almost embarrasses me to witness it, like I’ve walked in on something private.The second night, lying by the fireplace with a bottle of wine between us, I ask him, half-joking, whether he ever thinks about the future. Real estate.

Last Updated : 2026-08-27

The Woman at the Gallery

JADELauren has a photography show — small, a converted warehouse space in Bushwick, three dozen prints of hers hung on exposed brick, the kind of thing you go to because you love the person, not because you expect champagne that’s actually good.The champagne, it turns out, is actually good, because Derek is footing part of the bar tab without telling anyone, a fact I only discover later from Lauren herself, who hugs him so hard he actually looks alarmed, arms hovering awkwardly for a second before he figures out where they’re supposed to go, and I make a mental note to tease him about it for at least the next decade.I’m three glasses in and laughing at something Nina said when I feel the room’s temperature change the way it does right before something goes wrong.Vanessa is standing by the entrance in a dress the color of old blood, and she is not here for the photography.“Well,” she says, drifting toward me like she has all the time in the world, ignoring at least two people who

Last Updated : 2026-08-27

The Interview

JADEI interview for a junior editor position at a small documentary house in Chelsea the same week Vanessa plants her seed at the gallery, though I don’t connect the two events until much later, looking back at the calendar of that entire miserable month.The interview itself goes better than I expect. The founder, a woman named Odette who’s spent thirty years making the kind of unflinching documentaries that win festival awards nobody outside the industry has heard of, watches my thesis reel twice, asks sharp, specific questions about my choices — why that cut, why that music, why linger on that particular shot of an empty room — and by the end of it, offers me a trial contract on the spot, unheard of, apparently, for someone this early in a career.I call Derek from the sidewalk outside, giddy, before I remember I’m supposed to be composed and professional about things like job offers.“I got it,” I say, the second he picks up. “The Chelsea thing. She offered me a contract right th

Last Updated : 2026-08-27

Marcus’s Silence

JADENina brings news about Marcus the way you’d defuse a bomb — carefully, slowly, watching my face the whole time.“He asked about you,” she says, over coffee, not quite meeting my eyes. “Not directly. He asked me how you were doing in one of our —” she makes a face ” — arguments. Which is what we call our conversations now, apparently, because God forbid either of us admit we actually like talking to each other.”“What did you tell him?”“I told him you graduated with honors and you’re happy.” A pause. “He didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he said, and I quote, ‘good,’ in the most Marcus tone imaginable, and changed the subject to something about his rotation schedule. But Jade — he asked. That’s the part that matters. He didn’t have to ask.”“That’s it? Good?”“That’s it.” Nina reaches across the table, squeezes my hand. “It’s something, Jade. He’s not still spitting fire about it. That’s progress, even if it doesn’t feel like it from where you’re sitting.”I want to belie

Last Updated : 2026-08-27

Behind the Lens

LAURENNobody asks about me much, which has always suited me fine. I’m the quiet one, the one who watches instead of talks, the one who’s spent four years documenting everyone else’s chaos instead of generating any of my own. It isn’t a complaint. I like the view from behind a camera. You see things people don’t know they’re showing you.I see Jade fall in love with Derek months before she’d admit it to herself — the specific way her whole body used to angle toward wherever he was in a room, even mid-argument, even while insisting she hated him. I see Marcus’s face the day he found out, the exact moment something in him broke that had nothing to do with rules and everything to do with feeling replaced. I see Nina and Marcus circling each other for years, mistaking hostility for indifference, when anyone holding a camera long enough could tell you it was never indifference at all.What people don’t see, because I’ve never given them a reason to look, is that I’ve been quietly in love w

Last Updated : 2026-08-27

What Marcus never said

MARCUSNobody asks me what those eight months were actually like, and I don’t volunteer it, because admitting the truth feels like admitting I was as lost as everyone else in this whole mess, just quieter about it.I told myself I was angry about the betrayal — Derek, my best friend since we were seven years old, sleeping with my sister behind my back for months. That part was true. But underneath it, if I’m honest with myself in the specific way three a.m. hospital call rooms tend to force honesty out of a person, I was angrier that I hadn’t seen it coming. I’d spent years being the one who protected Jade, the one who kept the world’s rougher edges away from her, and somewhere in the middle of my own exhausting rotation schedule, I’d missed the entire thing happening two feet in front of me.It wasn’t really about the rule. It was about being unnecessary. About realizing that Jade didn’t need my permission or my protection anymore, that she’d built an entire life, a whole relationshi

Last Updated : 2026-08-27

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