All Chapters of SURROGATE FOR THE COLD BILLIONAIRE: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Dominic's POV Friday I buy flowers, not for Grace. Not as a gesture. Just because Emma mentioned once, six weeks ago, that she missed having flowers in the apartment, that her old place always had something from the corner market, cheap dahlias or grocery store tulips, and she'd stopped buying them when the bills got bad and never started again. I buy dahlias. Yellow and the deep burgundy ones. The woman at the market asks if they're for someone and I say yes and she wraps them and I carry them home and put them in the vase I had to search three cupboards to find. Emma comes in from the patisserie at one fifteen and sees them immediately. Stops. Looks at them. Looks at me. "Dahlias," she says. "The corner on Clement had good ones." She crosses to them and touches one petal. The way she

Dominic's POV Grace stays for two hours. Not the polite thirty minutes of an obligation visit. Two full hours during which she talks to Lily about her treatment with the specific focus of someone who has already researched the protocol, asks Emma three more questions about pastry that are actually questions about how Emma thinks, and drinks two cups of coffee without being offered a second. She helps herself. In my apartment. Emma sees it happen and says nothing and I watch Emma say nothing with the awareness that she's understood something about Grace that most people take years to learn. Grace doesn't ask for things she can take. Offering is a formality she finds inefficient. Emma just moves the coffee closer. Wordlessly. Grace notices. Doesn't acknowledge it. Pours the cup. But something settles in her

Dominic's POV Monday I go to Theodore on Sutter. Alone. Emma doesn't know I'm going. I tell her I have a meeting downtown and I do, after, but Theodore is first. The shop is narrow and old and smells like metal and something careful and Theodore himself is eighty if he's a day and he looks at the ring I've brought in a small box and goes very still. "Eleanor Westbrook," he says. "You knew her." "I sized this ring for her in 1962." He holds it under the light. "She came in alone. Paid for it herself. Said her husband had terrible taste and she'd rather choose." I look at the ring. "That sounds right." "She was an extraordinary woman." He sets it down. "Who's wearing it now." "My fiancée." "Tell me about her fingers." I describe Emma's hands from memory. The length and the specific taper

Emma's POV Four weeks out I start having a recurring thought I can't shake. Not anxiety. Not cold feet. Just this quiet persistent awareness that something is still unfinished. Something I need to do before I walk into that library and stand beside Dominic and say the words. It takes me three days to identify what it is. My mother. Not to invite her. She left when Lily was six and I was nine and the last address I had was eight years old and probably wrong. Not to reconcile. There's nothing to reconcile because reconciliation requires two people who both want the thing. Just to know I tried. I don't tell Dominic immediately. I sit with it for two days first, testing whether it's real or whether it's the pregnancy making me sentimental about things that don't deserve sentiment. By Thursday I'm certain it's real and I find him

Emma’s POVThe dress shop smells faintly of lavender and expensive fabric.Dominic keeps his promise.Mostly.He waits outside.For exactly seven minutes.Then I catch his reflection in the front window pretending to study a display of handbags while very obviously checking whether I’m still alive.Mrs. Kowalski, who somehow invited herself along after overhearing our plans, follows my gaze and snorts.“He’s terrible at pretending.”“I know.”“He has been pacing.”“It’s been seven minutes.”“He started pacing at minute two.”I laugh despite myself.The consultant helping me smiles.“The fiancé?”The word lands softly.Not shocking anymore.Not frightening.Just true.“Yes,” I say.The answer still feels new.Wonderful.Mine.The consultant leads me toward another fitting room.I’ve already rejected six dresses.One looked too formal.One felt too young.One made me look like a decorative cake topper.Mrs. Kowalski hated that one almost as much as I did.“This one,” she says now, thrus