All Chapters of Saved by Brother's Best Friend: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Marianna POVDr. Sarah Chen's office is on the fourteenth floor of a building in Brickell that has a view of the bay if you crane slightly to the left from the patient chair. I know this because I've been craning slightly to the left from the patient chair every Thursday at three PM for the past four weeks, not because the bay is particularly interesting but because it gives me something to look at when the conversation gets to places I'd rather look away from.She's forty-something, with reading glasses she takes on and off depending on whether she's writing or talking, and she has the specific quality of someone who has heard a great many things from a great many people and has not yet found a reason to be shocked by any of them.This is, as it turns out, exactly what I needed without knowing I needed it.The first session I talked about my job. The second session I talked about Marco and my parents and the general architecture of growing up Reyes, which is warm and loud and slightl

Marianna POVThe Singapore photos cycle through three more days of coverage before something else replaces them. A different driver's personal life, a sponsorship drama, the usual F1 off-season content that fills the calendar between race weekends.I stop searching for it on Tuesday. This is progress.In May I would have searched for it until my phone battery died and my self-esteem followed.Dr. Chen would call this growth. I call it learning to manage my own worst instincts.Jill calls on Wednesday evening while I'm eating leftovers and watching nothing in particular on Marco's television."I've been watching the tabloid situation," she says, without preamble. This is how Jill starts conversations."I know you have," I say."The photos are a nothing burger," she says. "I forensically analyzed the old one. He's not even looking at her.""Oliver checked the metadata.""Oliver checked the metadata," she repeats, with the specific approval she reserves for people who do thorough work. "

Marianna Duane gets back from Japan on a Thursday morning and by Thursday afternoon I have somehow agreed to have dinner with him and Marco at the Cuban eggs place, which means I spend Thursday morning in a state of low-grade anxiety.I change my outfit three times, which I'm not proud of. The first option is too formal like I'm trying to impress someone. The second option is too casual like I'm not trying at all, which reads as its own kind of statement. The third option is what I'm wearing when Marco appears in my doorway, takes one look at me, and says, "You've changed three times.""I've changed once," I say."Your first outfit is on the bed, your second outfit is on the chair, and you're wearing a third thing. That's three times." He leans against the doorframe with the relaxed energy of someone who is enjoying this far too much. "He's seen you in his sweatpants, Mari. I promise the bar has already been set."I point at him. "Get out of my room."He goes, laughing. I hear him in

Marianna I don't sleep, lying awake thinking. My brain runs a loop it can't get off—complaint, conduct, seven AM, who, why, which door—and every time you think you've landed on an answer your brain goes: but what if it's this other one, though. And then that one. And then the first one again, slightly worse. At 3 AM I open the Kinetic employee handbook on my phone and read the professional conduct section for the third time, looking for something that will tell me which version of terrible I'm walking into, and finding only the specific comfort of language so broad it covers everything and therefore tells me nothing. At 4 AM Marco appears in the kitchen doorway in his Georgetown Law shirt, sees me at the table, and says nothing. Just opens the fridge, finds the orange juic

Marianna. Ms. Portillo's pen is down. Dr. Lindholm is looking at her desk. At the folder I placed there. At something I can't see. "Why didn't you tell me the full account in May," Ms. Portillo says. Her voice has changed. Still controlled, but the surface has shifted—something underneath it that I haven't heard before. "Because I froze," I say. "In the room, and afterward." Dr. Lindholm is quiet for a long moment. "I want you to understand something," she says finally. "About how I intend to respond to Dr. Hartley's complaint." I look at her. My hands are shaking. I realize this distantly, the way you realize