Todos os capítulos de I Hired My Neighbor to Be My Girlfriend, Then Fell in Love: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

The reply came through before Everly had even set the phone down.*In person is fine. There's a café on Willow, two blocks from your building. Tomorrow, ten in the morning. Come alone.*Everly looked up at Nathaniel, who was watching her with careful restraint, clearly resisting the urge to ask before she offered. "She wants to meet tomorrow. Alone.""Do you want me to come? Not into the meeting, obviously, since she asked for you specifically, but nearby. Somewhere you could reach me if it went badly.""I think I need to do this without a safety net this time," Everly said, surprising herself with how true it felt as she said it. "Priya, I handled it by myself and it turned out fine. I think I can handle this too.""This is different from Priya," Nathaniel said carefully. "Priya wanted an ally. Vanessa might just want to hurt someone, and I'd rather that someone not be you.""I appreciate the concern. But if I let you manage every hard conversation that touches your past, I'm never g

They settled on Tuesday, four days out, enough time to prepare without giving either of them room to talk themselves out of it. Nathaniel spent the days leading up to it distracted and quieter than usual, and Everly recognized the particular kind of dread that came with rehearsing a hard conversation too many times in your own head until the words stopped sounding like words at all."You've reorganized that bookshelf three times today," she observed Sunday evening, watching him shuffle the same stack of paperbacks for what felt like the tenth pass, alphabetizing them and then abandoning the system halfway through. "That's not a good sign.""I don't know how to start it," he admitted, finally abandoning the pretense of tidying and sinking onto the couch beside her, dropping his head back against the cushion. "Every version I run through in my head sounds either too clinical or too dramatic. 'Mom, I hired a girlfriend' sounds insane. 'Mom, everything I told you was a lie, except the par

The days after telling Diane the truth passed in a strange, suspended quiet, neither disaster nor resolution, just a careful holding pattern that left Everly checking her phone more than she wanted to admit, half expecting either a furious message or complete silence to finally break the tension one way or the other.She threw herself into small distractions to keep from spiraling, reorganizing her own apartment even though most of her things had already migrated into Nathaniel's, sending out two more job applications despite the financial cushion his payment had given her, anything to keep her hands and mind occupied while she waited to learn whether Diane's careful, measured response from that difficult evening would hold or crack under further reflection."You're doing the thing again," Nathaniel said Wednesday evening, finding her scrubbing the kitchen counter for the third time that day. "The thing where you clean instead of talk about what's actually bothering you.""I don't hav

The reporter's name was Sarah Chen, and she arrived at a small coffee shop two blocks from Nathaniel's office, looking considerably less predatory than Everly had braced for, a notebook and recorder set neatly on the table between them, her expression professional but not unkind, more curious than combative from the moment she sat down."Thank you for reaching out first," Sarah said, once they'd all settled in with their coffees, hers black, Everly's barely touched. "I'll be honest, that doesn't happen often. Most people I contact either go silent completely or lawyer up within the hour, leaving me to piece together a story from fragments and secondhand quotes.""We'd rather tell this ourselves than have it told for us," Nathaniel said, his hand resting on the table close enough to Everly's that their fingers nearly touched. "Whatever you print, we want it to actually reflect what happened, not some sanitized or scandalized version that serves a headline better than the truth does.""

Friday arrived with a knot of dread Everly couldn't quite shake, the reporter's deadline finally catching up to them after a week that had already tested every fragile piece of trust they'd built. She and Nathaniel sat together on his couch that morning, both of them refreshing the Metro Business Journal's website every few minutes like the article might appear early if they just checked often enough, the anticipation somehow worse than any single confrontation they'd already survived."You're going to wear a hole in that phone screen," Nathaniel said, though his own knee was bouncing with the same restless energy, his coffee gone cold and untouched on the table in front of him."You're one to talk. You've refreshed your laptop four times in the last two minutes.""Five, actually. I'm keeping better count than you are."It went live at nine sharp.*THE ARRANGEMENT: How a Fake Relationship Became Real for Cross Industries Heir*Everly's stomach clenched at the headline alone, and she m