All Chapters of He had always been mine : Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

BRANDON POV I gave him the night.Not out of kindness. Out of strategy. The report from the car had been simple: he went upstairs, stayed inside, no second exit. I didn’t need cameras in his apartment to know what the daylight hours would cost him at home. Maya was not a fool. The shorter hair, the missing night, the long lunch sold as a meeting with a buyer—she would have put the pieces on the table even if she didn’t have the full picture yet. Let him sit in that. Let the ordinary walls press in. Let the questions start landing in the quiet after their daughter was asleep. Then send for him again while the pressure was still fresh and the lies were still soft.Morning went to the company. I sat through two meetings without hearing half of what was said. A contract crossed my desk that would have impressed my father if I still measured anything by his approval. I signed it. I answered a call from a board member who wanted reassurance about a shipping line in Asia. I gave him enough

KILLIAN POV Maya left in the morning with Leigh’s bag and a face that had already moved past argument.She didn’t slam anything. She didn’t make a speech. She laced Leigh’s shoes, answered our daughter’s questions about Auntie’s apartment with steady brightness, and paused only once at the door. Leigh waved from the hallway. Maya looked at me like she was taking a last inventory of a man she still recognized in pieces.“I’ll bring her back tomorrow evening,” she said. “Use the time.”Then they were gone.The apartment settled into a quiet I had never heard in it before. No cartoons. No small feet. No Maya’s voice from the kitchen correcting a story or asking if anyone wanted more toast. Just the refrigerator hum and the crack in the bathroom tile and the yellow numbers still taped above the meds that Leigh no longer needed every four hours. I walked through the rooms like a guest. Leigh’s tiger was gone—packed. The chair by her bed sat empty. Our bed was made with the precision of so

KILLIAN POV I tried to remember him.In the morning, while Maya made breakfast and Leigh argued with a sock that refused to match its pair, I stood at the kitchen counter with coffee cooling in my hand and pushed my mind back five years. Mercer Street. The third-floor studio above a closed print shop. The radiator that never worked properly and the windows that stuck every time the humidity rose. Weekend workshops for students who could not afford the formal programs—teenagers mostly, a few older ones who came when they could scrape the bus fare and the small materials fee. I had assisted for the stipend and because the work felt cleaner than the rest of my life at the time. I helped anyone who asked. Composition. Values. How to step back from a painting before you chased it into the ground. How to see the negative space instead of only the object.Faces blurred together when I reached for them. A quiet one in the corner who rarely spoke. Someone who stayed after to clean brushes wit

KILLIAN POV The place on Grove was half full and quiet enough that conversations stayed at their own tables.I arrived at ten twenty-five. Harlow was already there, at a corner table with a clear view of the door. He stood when I came in—not theatrical, just precise—and waited until I reached the chair before he sat again. Two menus lay unopened between us. A pot of coffee arrived without him having to signal; the server set it down, glanced at him once, and left. He had the kind of presence that made service happen without performance.“Thank you for coming,” he said.“You were persistent.”“I can be. When something matters.” He poured for both of us. His hands were steady. No jewelry. Clean nails. The shirt under his jacket was plain and expensive in the way that didn’t advertise itself. “I meant what I said at the studio. The afternoon on Mercer stayed with me. I was in a bad stretch then—money, direction, the kind of doubt that makes you almost quit. You treated the work like it

BRANDON POV The silence was deliberate.I had not sent a car in two days. Not because I had lost interest. Because the pattern needed a gap. Killian responded to pressure. He also responded to the sudden absence of it—started listening for the message that did not come, started filling the quiet with his own worst assumptions, started measuring the hours against the last time I had told him to appear. I let him sit in that while I handled something that had been waiting at the edge of my attention for weeks, a loose thread I had ignored because the claim on Killian had been louder and more urgent than the old quiet around my father’s private accounts.My father had been moving money again.Not through the main holdings. Not through the structures the board could see or the auditors could trace in a single afternoon. Through a secondary set of entities that predated my return from Seoul—quiet, regular, the kind of transfers that looked like maintenance or discretionary consulting unti