All Chapters of My Ex's Boss is My Baby's Father: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

191 Chapters

Chapter 152: The Edinburgh Question

The video call connected at 9:47 in the evening London time, which meant it was 5:47 in the morning in Tokyo, and Daniel knew from the quality of the light behind Leo that he had not slept."I need to tell you something," Daniel said.Leo was sitting at the small desk in his hotel room, still in the shirt he had worn to the meetings the day before, the collar open now, his hair the way it got when he had been running his hands through it for hours. He looked like a man who had been thinking about something difficult and had not finished thinking about it."Tell me," Leo said.Daniel had been rehearsing this conversation for three weeks. Not the words exactly, but the shape of it, the way he wanted to enter it without accusation, without the specific damage that came from saying the true thing in the wrong register. He had written it down twice and deleted both versions because what he wrote sounded like a complaint and what he meant was more careful than that."Edinburgh called again,

Chapter 153: What Daniel Needs

Leo came home on Thursday.He had said he would come after the trip, at the scheduled end of it, and instead he was at the front door at half past two on Thursday afternoon with his carry-on still over his shoulder and the particular look of someone who had been on a plane for twelve hours and had spent most of those hours thinking.Daniel opened the door and stood there for a moment."The meetings," he said."Rescheduled." Leo set his bag down in the hallway. "I know you said not to.""I said don't cancel them.""I rescheduled them. It's different." He looked at Daniel with the careful attention of someone who had been looking at a screen version of a person for eleven days and was now recalibrating to the real one. "Is this overwhelming?"Daniel considered the question honestly, which was the only way he knew how to consider things. "Yes," he said. "And necessary."Leo nodded. He came inside.Clara was at school. Matteo was at his Thursday afternoon programme. They had two hours of

Chapter 154: The Circle Decision

Leo called his mother from the garden while Daniel walked to Clara's school.It was cold enough that he could see his breath, and he stood near the back wall where the climbing rose had gone bare for winter, his hands in his jacket pockets, and waited for her to pick up. She answered on the second ring as she always did."I'm home," he said."I know," she said. "Daniel texted me."Leo absorbed this. "When?""About an hour ago. He said you'd come back early and that you'd probably call.""He knew I'd call you.""Of course he knew." There was warmth in her voice and the particular quality she had when she was paying full attention, which was different from her general attentiveness and which Leo had been able to distinguish since he was small. "Tell me."He told her. Not the version he had given Daniel, not the careful and accountable version, but the version underneath it: the specific shame of being told by the person you loved most that you had made them invisible without meaning to,

Chapter 155: Clara's Question

The project arrived home in Clara's backpack on a Tuesday, three weeks into the new arrangement.It was a folded piece of pale blue card with MY FAMILY printed across the top in the teacher's handwriting, and below that a series of boxes with instructions: Draw the people in your family. Write their names. Write where they live. There was a second page with a longer prompt: Sometimes families look different from each other. Write about what makes your family special.Clara brought it to the kitchen table after school and spread it out with the focused attention she brought to important things, which was most things. She was six and small for it, with Leo's dark hair and Daniel's precise way of holding a pencil, and she had been sitting with the project for twenty minutes before she said anything.Leo was at the counter with his laptop, working through the transition documentation for the incoming CEO. He had been watching her think without letting her know he was watching."Papa," she

Chapter 156: Edinburgh

Leo had been to Edinburgh once before, at sixteen, on a school trip that he remembered primarily as two days of rain and a lot of standing in front of things while a teacher explained their significance. He had a photograph somewhere of himself on the Royal Mile looking cold and slightly bored, Blair's city meaning nothing to him at that age beyond the fact that his grandmother had once mentioned it as the place where Chloe and Blair's story had a chapter he had not been told in full.He arrived on a Friday evening in November, the train from King's Cross pulling into Waverley just as the city was doing what Edinburgh did at dusk in November: turning itself into something from a different century, the castle on its rock lit against a sky that had gone deep blue and bruised at the edges, the old town stacked above the station in the way of a city that had been building upward for a thousand years because the geography insisted on it.Daniel was waiting at the barrier. Not with a sign o

Chapter 157: Matteo's Adjustment

The nightmares started in the second week.Matteo had always been a sound sleeper, the kind of child who went down easily and stayed down, who woke in the mornings with the uncomplicated energy of someone who had no unfinished business with the night. He was four and solidly built and had Daniel's brown eyes and a laugh that came from somewhere deep and arrived without warning, and he had spent his whole life in a house where the routines were reliable and the people in them were present.The new arrangement was not a disaster for Matteo. It was something more specific than that: it was a disruption to the predictability that had been the architecture of his security, and the disruption was small enough that the adults around him had not immediately understood what it was costing him.The first nightmare, Leo went in at two in the morning to find Matteo sitting upright in his bed saying Daniel's name in the flat repeated way of a child still mostly asleep. Leo sat on the edge of the b

Chapter 158: The First Recipients

The event was held in Circle's London offices on a Thursday evening in January, the long room on the fourth floor cleared of its usual workstations and set with chairs and a low table of food that Leo had asked his assistant to keep simple: nothing that required balancing a plate and a drink simultaneously, nothing that signalled a celebration of itself rather than the people in the room.Twelve students. Four institutions. The selection had taken three months and had involved a committee that Leo had assembled with deliberate care: a fashion educator, a working designer from outside Circle's orbit, a representative from each partner institution, and Chloe herself, who had reviewed every application and whose comments in the margins of the selection documents had been the most useful thing in the process.She had written, next to one application: This woman is angry. Fund her. Angry is energy waiting for direction.That application was Grace Okafor, forty-four, who had spent seventeen

Chapter 159: Renewed

The house was on the Fife coast, north of Edinburgh, reached by a road that ran along the shoreline and narrowed toward the end into something that required genuine commitment. It had been recommended by Fiona from the archive, who had described it as honest, which turned out to mean: cold in the mornings until the heating caught up, windows that rattled when the wind came off the water, a kitchen with everything necessary and nothing decorative, a view of the Firth of Forth that made all of that irrelevant.They arrived on a Sunday afternoon in mid-December, the semester finished, Clara and Matteo left with Chloe and Lucien in London with the confidence of children who understood that being left with grandparents was not abandonment but a specific and reliable category of pleasure. Matteo had asked three times when they were coming back and had been shown the calendar and had crossed off the departure day with his crayon and had then gone to find Lucien with something urgent to tell

Chapter 160: Next Chapter

The new CEO's name was Adaeze Nwosu, and she had been Circle's Head of Operations for three years before Leo promoted her, which meant the board had been watching her work long enough to have opinions about it, most of them good.She was thirty-six and had come to sustainable fashion through supply chain logistics, which gave her a relationship to the practical mechanics of circular production that complemented Leo's creative and strategic instincts in the specific way of two people whose expertise occupied adjacent rather than overlapping territory. In the months since her appointment she had restructured the Asian expansion timeline with a precision that Leo would not have brought to it, identifying three points of vulnerability in the original plan that his board had approved without catching. She had presented the restructure to Leo without the apologetic framing that some people brought to correcting their predecessors and he had been grateful for the absence of it.She was, Leo

Chapter 161: The Seoul Commission

The studio in Mapo was on the fourth floor of a building that had been, at various points in its history, a printing house, a garment factory, and a storage facility for a company that imported Italian kitchen equipment. The current landlord had divided the upper floors into artist spaces and left the bones of the previous occupants visible: the original iron columns, the freight elevator that still worked if you held the gate closed with one hand while pressing the button with the other, the windows that ran the length of the north wall and produced the kind of flat consistent light that Emma had learned, across years of making work that depended on how light moved through fabric, to value above almost any other quality in a workspace.She had arrived in Seoul in September and it was now the second week of November and she had been working for eleven weeks on something that was either the best thing she had ever made or a catastrophic miscalculation, and most days she could not tell

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