บททั้งหมดของ Lover by Design: บทที่ 81 - บทที่ 87

CelesteNeither of us spoke for a long time.The file glowed between us. He didn’t move to take it, didn’t reach to explain, didn’t do a single one of the things a guilty man does. He just stood in the doorway and let me hold the worst of him and waited, because he’d decided, somewhere, to stop managing even this.“You didn’t lock it,” I said finally.“No.”“You knew I’d look. You left so I could.”“Yes.”“Why?”“Because you asked me once to stop deciding what you’re allowed to know, and the file is the biggest thing I ever decided you couldn’t handle.”He stayed where he was, keeping the distance, which I understood was a courtesy.“If I’d hidden it, or deleted it, or gotten to it before you did, I’d have been doing the exact thing again, protecting yo

CelesteThe arrest of Michael Harbinger was global news within the hour, because Ferrand doesn’t do anything without arranging for the world to watch it.I watched it break across every screen I owned, the story arriving fully formed, the way Ferrand’s stories always arrive, no rough edges, no journalistic uncertainty, just a clean narrative sliding into place as if it had always been true.They had a new headline for me, because of course they did. Not the prostitute. Not the blackmailer. Something that folded both old stories into the new one and made all three retroactively inevitable.The disgraced Hartwell sister and the rogue operative. Lovers and conspirators. A woman who’d sold herself and then bled her lover, and a shadow-man who did her killing, the two of us a criminal partnership all along, and Huxley just the first body between us.It was elegant. It made everything I’d suffered this ye

CelesteSienna and I had never once, in thirty years, told each other the truth about what the family did to us. We did it that night, in a safe flat, with Michael in a cell and the world on fire, because it turns out catastrophe is the only thing that ever gets two Hartwell women to stop performing.She’d stayed. Days now, at real risk, in my hiding place, and we’d been circling each other with the careful love of two people who share a wound and have never once discussed it. And that night, finally, one of us put down the choreography.It was Sienna. Of course it was Sienna. She’s always been the brave one, whatever else is true.“They made you the pretty one,” she said, out of nowhere, into the dark. “And they made me the capable one. And we both spent our whole lives thinking the other one got the better deal.”I went very still.“Mum and Dad looked at two daughter