All Chapters of HOW I BECAME THE BILLIONIARE’S SURROGATE.: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

65 Chapters

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

There was a rhythm to the mornings at the Morelli penthouse that Aria had not realized was as certain as an exhalation, ever since she had signed her name in twelve pages of contract language at three am and agreed to be inside someone else's life for three years. She had anticipated efficiency.The cool, precisely-aimed efficiency of a man who could very well run a worldwide conglomerate in the same meticulous way he ran every other part of his life.She had expected the schedules tacked to the kitchen wall, meals appointed by the minute, family members knowing their appointed station like employees in a subsidiary of the Morelli Group.What she had not been prepared for was Adrian Morelli at the kitchen island at 6:45 A.M. in the grey shirt that had been washed enough times to go soft at the collar and his hair uncombed for the day, perusing the financial news on his telephone with the look of someone who has yet to construct the persona of himself that he carries to the world.He g

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

About Marianna was that she knew a lot more about the inside of the Morelli houseknew it longer than almost anybody alive, beyond Cassandra's and his parents'; beyond even her own, because parents and siblings glimpse reality through the filter of the love and history that distorts it, but a housekeeper glimpses what someone really is day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute: the person they are when no one's watchingthe person they are at six in the morning with yesterday's tears still on their face; the person they are at eleven at night, with theirarmor of the moment cast aside because they haven't got the energy to wear it. Marianna revealed so much of this to Ariaprecisely in length and toneand in such a calm careful measured way, as a person might reveal a treasure, parceling it out at a conserve pace, because if it were all revealed at once, then it would be heavy, and had the flavor of rumor, when it was not rumor but only fact, clustered by the person who'd been watching fo

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

The Morelli mansion in autumn was a completely different place than the one she had visited in a delicate rose-scented evening of May. The old oaks that flanked the driveway had turned colors deep amber and copper-rust and most typically burnt gold of October doing its most intentional work and the scent of the place was woodsmoke and wet earth with something sweetly fermenting in the orchard beyond the east garden. The sky was the definite shade of blue that only comes after the first cold nights, a clean and vertiginous blue which invariably makes the objects under it look more like themselves.They reached the estate on a Sunday. Adrian was behind the wheel, as he always was when they headed for Westchester, and he drove just like he did tempo most of the time efficiently, without any drama, and even leaving enough of his attention free to notice other things. She used to spend these rides in talking since the car was one of the very few zones where the regular setup of the pentho

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

The clinic was situated in a discreet building on the Upper East Side with so little indication of the place that there was just a suite number on a simple steel plate next to the elevator in the lobby. Farida Osei, MD was a maternal-fetal medicine specialist for twenty years and naturally had the unique trait of someone who has given both bad news and good news in equal measure and has learned to treat both with the same meticulous, calm manner.Aria was going to her doctor appointments on her own. Not as a way of making a point -she hadn't thought of it that way. It was simply the way it had always been: she managed her own medical appointments, her own health, the various administrative logistics of her own body, and from her perspective, the understanding she had with Adrian did not require him being present for her things that were primarily about her.It was this thought process which she had been reflecting on while driving to the clinic, and she realized that this was the atti

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

The brake failure occurred on Tuesday night late October, on the Saw Mill River Parkway, at sixty miles per hour, between exits with no shoulder wide enough to be 'adequate, ' and the guardrail closer than she would have liked.They were coming back from a specialist appointment that Adrian had set up as a maternal-fetal medicine consultant he had found through the hospital's academic medical center, which is the type of second opinion that only comes about after a person has done a lot of research and placed a lot of calls. She didn't ask him for it. He didn't tell her he was doing it. It just appeared on the calendar as a fact of the day, just like the yogurt appeared and the better chair appeared and all the other things appeared that he did without turning them into a discussion.The consultation overran the time scheduled. It was a good consultation, as these things go the consultant was very detailed and the results were good, and they had a very detailed conversation about the

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

The replacement car was a black sedan. The driver didn't ask any questions and, when the partition was raised without being asked, he did exactly the right thing. They sat down at the back and the city through the window was coming closer in a very particular way it must have been the way the city comes closer when it is the place you are returning to after having done something difficult piece by piece building up, until it is the complete and overwhelming fact of home. Adrian actually had been talking even before the car came. And he was not talking in the way he usually talked, not in the complete precise information-organized sentences, but in the rather loose way of someone who, after being taken to an unexpected place in their own story is quite unexpectedly, finding that this place is accessible.Back then he was twelve years old. February had been very cold in the Hudson Valley: three snow days during which the Westchester estate was covered with

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

She made the jacket in late October, using every spare moment when neither the Institute, the baby, nor the household arrangements demanded her presence which was ironically both not many hours and enough hours, as she had already learned and was still learningthat, if you are serious about guarding your work, it will always find its time.Delacroix's was the brief: one piece of clothing that could reveal the person wearing it at a glance. No other instructions. No specific method, no particular fabric, no expected silhouette. Just: who is she, and if that is the case, how does the item you have created communicate it to me without words.She had given it a lot of thought, the very week preceding the moment she touched the cloth. It was a method, passed to her by her mother and solidified through the course, not to start a project without understanding what it was going to be, not the technical details, which were to come laterbut rather the core truth of it. A garment had to 'know' s

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

It was Wednesday evening when she stumbled upon the piece of evidence, but it did not come to her in an earth-shattering manner at all. Instead, it was one of those confirmations that come in such a quiet, specific way if you have been patient enough: something that you have half-known and is now completely visible.She was working in the library then. The Morelli penthouse had a library which was something she had discovered only in the second week and had quite immediately decided to use by herself as a secondary workspace for the times when the studio room's intense concentration felt like the last straw and she needed to think more generally. It had a nice amount of daylight and a very comfortable writing chair along with bookshelves that held the crazy mix of Marco's business books, Elena's novels, and Adrian's architectural monographs, which is pretty much the whole story of a family; it had everything you wanted to know about a family.She was doing the collection brief notes,

CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

Adrian did not sleep that night. She was aware of it because a penthouse had a distinctive atmosphere at two in the morning that she was very familiar with a specific presence of a person, the way a place felt differently when someone in it was awake and thinking versus asleep and absent. She was in the kitchen at half past two for water and he was on the island with his laptop and four printed documents and the quiet, compressed stillness of a man who has been working through something complicated for a long time and has not yet finished.He glanced at her as she took a step in. Then he glanced down at the papers. "The Hong Kong subsidiary, " he said. "There is a paper trail that Anderson would have found useful. Roman had the access code to the study safe I changed it three weeks ago for unrelated reasons, which is lucky, because the most recent documents are in there. What he has had access to is enough to cause problems but not enough to cause the spe

CHAPTER THIRTY

She had been preparing it since five o'clock.The chicken recipe of her mother was just a personal one. It had never been written down her mother wasn't the kind of person who would write down recipes, she was a person who worked by feeling, by reminiscences through senses, and by the special kind of intelligence of a person who believes food is a form of attention, a means of saying: "I am attending to you quite enough to make this properly". She got to know it through watching, then making mistakes twice, and after that, doing it right. The one she now had was the unchanged one, with the particular balance of the preserved lemon to olive to garlic that created the scent that only the people working hard can recognize.She spatchcocked the chicken as her mother had taught her the backbone taken out, flattened down, the whole thing spread up so it would cook evenly in the covered pan before finishing in the oven. She braised it slowly with the preserved lemons and a qu

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