All Chapters of The Man My Bestfriend Call Dad: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The morning air outside the hotel hit my face like a slap.I stood on the sidewalk for two full minutes, watching a yellow taxi hit a puddle near the curb, my mind completely blank. My dress felt wrinkled. My feet ached in my heels. In my right coat pocket, the heavy weight of the stolen cufflink pressed against my hip bone every time I took a breath.When the cab finally pulled over, I practically threw myself into the back seat."Lower East Side," I told the driver, leaning my head against the cold glass of the window.My phone vibrated in my lap. I flinched, almost dropping it onto the floorboards.Sofia: Landing in an hour. Have the espresso machine running or I will personally throw your favorite boots in the trash.A sudden wave of heat washed over my face, straight down to my chest. I looked at the screen, my thumb hovering over the glass.If you only knew, I thought, a strange, nervous knot twisting in my stomach.I closed the text thread, opening a blank note instead, staring

He didn't look at me again.That was the first thing my brain registered through the blinding haze of panic. Alessandro released the banister, finished his descent down the marble steps with fluid, measured grace, and stepped directly toward his daughter."Welcome home, tesoro," he said softly.He pulled Sofia into a brief, warm embrace, kissing the crown of her head. Up close, in the bright light of his own hallway, he looked precisely like the man I had spent six years assuming he was: a distinguished, remarkably polished patriarch of an elite New York family.My hands were shaking. I shoved them deep into the pockets of my jeans, praying neither of them noticed the slight tremor in my shoulders."Dad, look what I found," Sofia said, stepping back and holding up her open palm. The gold cufflink sat squarely in the center of her hand, the broadsword catch catching the chandelier light."Bella had one of your cufflinks in her bag. Did you leave it at the apartment when you dropped off

The dress Sofia picked for me on Madison Avenue wasn't something I would have ever chosen for myself.It was a column of midnight-blue silk with a neckline that rested modestly just below my collarbones, but the entire back was nonexistent, scooping low down to the small of my spine in a subtle, dangerous plunge."It makes your eyes look like storm clouds, and it fits like liquid," Sofia had declared in the boutique dressing room, refusing to take no for an answer before slapping down her credit card.Six days later, standing in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom, I smoothed the heavy silk over my hips. I pinned my hair up into a loose chignon, leaving a few soft tendrils to frame my neck. I looked refined, elegant, and entirely prepared to pretend I belonged among the city’s elite.Inside, my stomach was in knots.The black sedan Sofia dispatched for me arrived at seven sharp. The ride up to the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue was a blur of rain-slicked pavement an

By Wednesday afternoon, my living room looked like a battlefield of blueprints, material boards, and empty espresso cups.I hadn't withdrawn my name. Instead, I had spent forty-eight hours straight refining my proposal for the Old Exchange Building until it was bulletproof. I overhauled the structural load calculations, added a detailed historical preservation compliance matrix, and created a 3D rendering of the main trading floor that brought the original 1890s ceiling back to life.If Alessandro was going to use his foundation veto to kill my application, he wasn't going to be able to hide behind a generic excuse about my qualifications. He was going to have to look Arthur Vance and the rest of the board in the eye and reject the best proposal in the stack.My phone rang at four o'clock."Bella?" Arthur Vance’s voice came through the speaker, booming and cheerful. "I just finished reviewing your revised site assessment and structural rendering. My dear, it’s magnificent. The histori

Alessandro had told me to be there at eight. I arrived thirty minutes early, partly because I wanted to inspect the building before Marco arrived and partly because I hadn't slept well enough to justify another minute in bed.The Financial District was shrouded in a dense, river-born fog that muffled the sound of early commuter traffic. Wall Street looked ghostlike, the soaring granite facades of old banking houses rising into the gray mist.I stood at the narrow iron gate tucked between two stone pillars on Wall Street, half a block from the main entrance of the Old Exchange Building. I pulled the heavy brass key from my coat pocket, the dark leather fob cool against my palm, and fitted it into the antique lock. A heavy mechanical click echoed in the alleyway, and the gate swung open.A flight of steep stone steps wound down into a narrow brick corridor beneath street level, smelling of damp granite, old iron, and ozone. At the bottom sat a reinforced steel security hatch painted mat