《Falling For My Father's Best Friend》全部章節：第 11 章 - 第 20 章

Noel stood in the dark office under the low red emergency lights. Damien’s blood still marked the carpet in uneven patches. Gabriel’s bandaged hand hung at his side, the white gauze already stained. Police sirens wailed somewhere far below the building, rising and falling without ever getting closer. The air smelled of antiseptic and iron. Footsteps echoed through the empty hallways, too many of them, coming from every direction at once. Noel moved through the corridors looking for his mother. He did not know how he knew she was here, only that she had to be. He passed overturned chairs and scattered files. The emergency lights flickered and cast long shadows that moved when he was not looking directly at them. “Mom?” Noel called her name once, the sound disappeared into the quiet space without a response. At the end of the longest hallway a woman stood with her back to him. She wore a pale blue sweater Noel somehow recognized from a single childhood photograph he was no longer s

Gabriel sat at his desk with a contract open in front of him and read the same paragraph three times without absorbing a single word.The gym. Noel had said it so casually as if it were just normal. “Tried the gym near the building.” “Met someone who knows how the machines work.”Those words shouldn't have mattered to Gabriel. It didn't concern him what Noel was doing. Noel was a fully grown adult. He could go to whatever gym he wanted. Gabriel was his uncle and employer. He was only responsible for him professionally and not personally.Even after telling himself all these, Gabriel still didn't understand why the thought was still sitting in the middle of his concentration.He tried to return to the contract. The words on the page seemed to scatter around. He closed the file and opened another. The same thing happened. *It does not concern me*, he told himself again. *I am overthinking this. I have work to finish.* The loop continued anyway.The gym near the office. He knew which one.

Gabriel noticed the empty desk before he noticed the time. Noel's laptop was gone. His notebook, the one covered in coffee rings he refused to explain, wasn't where he usually left it. The chair was pushed in too neatly, like someone had left in a hurry and then thought better of the mess. Gabriel checked the clock. Almost seven. Noel hadn't said anything to him before he left. That shouldn't have mattered. He was twenty-two. He didn't need to report his movements to Gabriel any more than any other associate did. Gabriel told himself that twice, and both times it did nothing to loosen the knot sitting under his ribs. Gabriel found one of the paralegals still packing up near the copy room and asked, as casually as he could manage, if she'd seen Noel leave. "Yeah, a while ago. He had his gym bag." Gym bag. Gabriel thanked her and went back to his office, where he sat for longer than he wanted to admit, doing absolutely nothing productive, turning that detail over like it meant so

Noel got to Dad's twenty minutes late, still smiling at his phone, and he didn't even try that hard to hide it. "Where were you?" Dad called from the kitchen. "Around," Noel said, which wasn't an answer, but Dad let it go the way he always did when he assumed Noel meant nothing worth chasing. Then Noel walked into the dining room and Gabriel was already sitting there, and whatever was left of his good mood didn't disappear exactly, it just had to make room for something else. Gabriel looked up. His eyes went to Noel's face first, then to the phone still in his hand, like he was cataloguing both. "Good evening?" Gabriel asked. "Yeah," Noel said, and left it at that. Dinner started the way it always did when Dad was nervous about something without knowing what — too many stories, too fast, filling every gap before it had the chance to become a silence. Dad told the one about Gabriel trying to flip a burger and setting off the smoke alarm at three different houses over the years,

Noel checked his phone four times in the car, not for messages, just to have something to do with his hands."You're acting like I'm meeting your parole officer," Julian said, pulling into the driveway."My dad's not scary.""Didn't say he was. You're the one who's been fixing your collar for the last ten minutes."Noel made himself stop. "I just want this to be normal.""It's dinner, Noel."It was dinner. It was also the first time Noel was bringing someone into his father's house who meant something to him, and he'd already decided, somewhere between leaving work and picking Julian up, exactly how he was going to introduce him. Friend from the gym. Nothing more specific than that. If Dad asked how they met, Noel had an answer ready. If he asked why they spent so much time together, Noel had an answer for that too.Noel just hoped he wouldn't need either one.◊◊Dad answered the door in the middle of drying his hands on a dish towel and gave Julian the same easy handshake he gave eve