บททั้งหมดของ Lover by Design: บทที่ 31 - บทที่ 40

CelesteYou learn a person in the small hours, not the dangerous ones.A week of hiding in a rented house taught me things about Michael that twelve years of Sienna’s careful research never turned up, because dossiers record what a person does and miss entirely what he is.He can’t sleep with his back to a window and pretends it’s a preference. He reads three books at once and finishes none of them. He cooks, badly, with total confidence, and gets quietly, genuinely wounded when it comes out wrong, which is the most human thing about him. He hums when he thinks he’s alone, always the same four bars, always stopping the instant he catches himself, as though joy were a security breach.None of it is in a file. All of it is him.On the third morning, he handed me a coffee.He’d made it himself, black, the way he takes his, and set it in front of me like a completed task, and something in m

MichaelThe after-party was small, candlelit, and built for people to watch each other be indiscreet.Fifteen couples, the real circle, everyone touching their partner a degree more than they would sober. It was the kind of room where a couple who kept a polite distance would stand out like a confession, so Celeste closed the distance, and I let her run it, because running it was clearly the most fun she’d had in weeks.She was extraordinary. She fed Camille exactly enough attention to keep the woman glowing and leaking, and she wove Elise Caron through the room as if she’d been born to it, one hand always somewhere on me, my collar, my wrist, the back of my neck, marking me as hers for an audience that respected ownership more than affection. And she watched herself do it. That’s the part I kept catching. Celeste doesn’t only perform. She stands slightly behind her own performance, enjoying it, adjusting it, and

CelesteMaya and Ollie called on the secure line the next morning, and I heard them before Michael finished connecting the audio, mid-argument, finishing each other’s sentences and then fighting about the ending.“She’s right,” Ollie said, without hello, which from Ollie is a standing ovation. “Celeste. Whatever you did at that resort. You were right, and I have never been so annoyed to confirm anything in my life.”“Start with the part where I’m right. I like that part.”“Vasseur and the Aumont woman.” Ollie’s keys clattered. “I’ve stared at this circle’s finances for weeks, and there’s a set of transfers that never made sense. Money moving between the Aumont fortune and structures Vasseur controls, at intervals I couldn’t explain. Not business rhythm. Not tax rhythm. Random, I thought. Noise.”A pause, and somethin

Celeste“Do you ever wonder whether the person beside you has told you why he chose you?”I let it land on my face.That was the whole trick of it, and I saw the trick even as I performed being caught by it. Ferrand wasn’t asking a question. He was planting one.He’d spent the evening deciding I was the more interesting of the two of us, and this was his opening move, not against our cover, but against the one thing that actually held Michael and me together in the dark.My trust.He wanted a hairline crack in it, somewhere he could work a blade in later.So I gave him the crack. A real-looking one. I let my smile falter for exactly the beat a woman’s smile falters when a stranger names the fear she keeps in the cellar, and I watched Ferrand register it, and file it, certain now that he’d found a lever.Because a manipulator who thinks he’s winning gets generou

CelesteI have never felt more myself than when I’m walking into a room I’m not supposed to be in.The foundation gala filled a restored palazzo with three hundred people performing generosity, and I moved through it the way I move through water, which is to say I stopped thinking about it and let it carry me.Elise Caron had a cause tonight, some children’s charity she cared about in the vague, well-funded way of the very rich, and within twenty minutes she’d been introduced to half the room and remembered by all of it.The trick isn’t charm. Everyone thinks it’s charm. The trick is that I actually find them interesting, the whole awful glittering lot, and people who feel genuinely seen open like doors.I’ve been opening rooms this way since I was young enough to be dismissed in them. Michael worked the edges. I could feel him out there in my ear, a low steady presence, cataloguin