Todos os capítulos de The Wrong Brother, The Right Mistake: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

I got home a little after one, with my lipstick still intact, my head still full of Italian men, and my patience already in the ICU ever since Zach Bandini said, Ms. Moguel is coming.My house was in The Whitmore Mews, a private townhouse complex in the West Village that was very beautiful, very quiet, and very expensive in the kind of way that made normal people automatically lower their voices when they walked through the iron gates.From the outside, it looked like a row of old red-brick townhouses too polite to admit they had private elevators, twenty-four-hour security, a small garden in the middle of the courtyard, and neighbors who bought organic almond milk like they were signing an international peace treaty.I liked it because it wasn’t flashy.Mama hated it because, according to her, my house was “too small for a woman with a child and trauma.” Papa liked it because the security system meant he could sleep at night without calling me three times a day.The car stopped in fr

This afternoon, I showed up in Gramercy with one work bag, one folder of floor plans, a laser measure, a three-page checklist, and a professional attitude cold enough to make a houseplant question its life choices.I was also wearing a white blazer.Not because I wanted to look pretty. Well, I always looked pretty, and that was a genetic condition that occasionally became inconvenient.I picked the white blazer because it made me look like a woman who had come to measure rooms, not like a woman who had once fled Lake Como after sleeping with the owner of the house.My hair was pulled into a low bun, my nude lipstick was neat, my heels were sharp enough to puncture a rich man’s ego, and in my head, I had already arranged a very simple order of operations.Go in.Measure.Take notes.Criticize.Leave.Do not remember the balcony. Do not remember the Barolo. Do not remember the dark wooden door and Zach’s voice saying, last chance to leave.Very easy.I want to believed it.The townhouse

A long diamond earring with a delicate white setting. Elegant, expensive, a little too formal for my age back then. I recognized it because Mama had picked it out a few weeks before Lake Como while telling me my dress was already busy enough and my face didn’t need any extra competition.I remembered complaining that the earrings were heavy. I remembered telling Camilla one of them could kill a small bird if I threw it hard enough.Camilla.Lorenzo.Wine cellar.Barolo.Zach’s room.The plane.Two red lines.Abby looking up at me from beneath her black bangs and asking, Did you lie?I didn’t touch the earring. “What is this?” I asked.Very smart, Aubrey.Zach stood beside the desk, one hand still near the open drawer. “Your earring.”I looked at it again. “I didn’t realize I’d lost it.”“I know.”“How do you know?”“You left in a hurry.”I took a slow breath. “Your texts.”His eyes stayed on me. “Yeah.”I wanted to laugh. Because for five years, it had lived in my head as something el

After dropping Abby and Hannah off at preschool, which included watching my daughter get out of the car, spot Max near the entrance, and immediately hand him her little tote with, “Hold this for a second, I have to talk to Sophie,”Right before I rolled down the window and yelled, “ABIGAIL MOGUEL, CARRY YOUR OWN BAG,”I got to Madison Avenue at twelve past nine with one important decision.The earring had to be buried.I had not completely lost my mind.I walked into my office, closed the door, set my bag on the chair, and reached into the small inner pocket.The Lake Como earring dropped into my palm with far too much elegance for an object that had spent the last twenty-four hours making my concentration work overtime.The small diamond caught the morning light.I stared at it, and it stared back in the deeply irritating way inanimate objects sometimes managed.“You’re just an earring,” I told it.I opened the bottom desk drawer, moved aside a box of old business cards, two chargers

The screen lit up before I could touch it.Hannah.A photo appeared in the preview.Abby.It was only a tiny thumbnail, but I immediately recognized the two little pigtails from that morning, her round cheeks, black bangs, and something purple she was probably holding near her face while making an outrageous expression.I didn’t even get a chance to read the whole message.[Your feminist CEO has apparently fired Max because...]I flipped the phone facedown.I looked up to see Zach’s eyes were already on my phone, then on me. “Problem?”“No.” My answer came too quickly too.Great, Aubrey.I pushed the legal folder toward him. “Done. You’re officially free to go back to running capitalism.”Zach’s gaze stayed on me half a second longer before dropping to the folder. “I thought you liked capitalism.”“I like getting invoices paid.”“Thin distinction.”“The distinction is that I have morals and an accounting department.”He took the documents. I grabbed my phone and slipped it into the s