All Chapters of One Night with My Ex's Billionaire Best Friend: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

147 Chapters

CHAPTER SIX: WHAT INSECURITY SOUNDS LIKE AT 2 AM

I do not tell Lucian I am struggling.This is a decision I make consciously, somewhere between Sophia leaving at noon and Lucian coming home at nine, somewhere in the six hours I spend answering emails I don’t fully read and sitting through a media strategy call where Sophia uses words like narrative containment and pressure cycle and I take notes in handwriting that gets smaller and tighter as the hour goes on.I do not tell him because he is already carrying Emma and the board and the leak investigation and the particular grief of a man who has just learned he missed ten years of a child’s life. I do not tell him because I am the person he leans on, and I have never minded that, have never once resented it, but tonight the weight of being that person feels different. Heavier. Like something shifted in the foundation while I wasn’t looking.He comes home looking tired in a way he doesn’t usually show. He eats the dinner I reheated without tasting it. He tells me the board call went a

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE DNA TEST HE AGREED TO

Ethan Cross arrives at nine on the dot.He is the kind of man who is always exactly on time, not early, not late, precisely punctual in a way that feels like a statement about how he moves through the world. Controlled. Deliberate. I have always liked that about him. This morning I like it more than usual because everything else feels loose and uncertain and Ethan walking in at exactly nine with his briefcase and his measured expression is something solid to hold onto.He shakes my hand before Lucian’s, which he always does, and which I have never once pointed out to Lucian.“Ariana,” he says. “How are you holding up?”“Functioning,” I say.“Good enough,” he says, and means it.We sit at the dining table. Lucian at the head, Ethan across from me, documents already arranged in front of him with the particular neatness of a man who organized them on the way over in the car. He does not waste time on preamble.“The court-supervised DNA test is the right move,” he says. “It closes the doo

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE INVESTOR WHO SMELLS BLOOD

Gabriel Kane calls at ten past eleven.Not Marcus. Not a representative. Not a carefully worded email routed through three layers of corporate courtesy. Gabriel Kane himself, from a number that Lucian’s phone identifies by name, which means it has been saved, which means there was a time when that was a number worth keeping.I am standing in the kitchen refilling my coffee when Lucian’s phone lights up on the counter between us. He sees the name. Something in his face does not change exactly, it just goes very still, the way still water looks still but isn’t.He picks it up.“Kane,” he says.I do not leave the room. He does not ask me to.I watch his face while he listens. It is an exercise I have become very good at over two years, reading the version of Lucian that exists between his words, in the set of his shoulders and the particular quality of his silence. Right now his shoulders are back and his jaw is level and his eyes are doing that thing where they focus on a point in the m

CHAPTER NINE: THE COLLAPSE SHE HIDES

The board presentation is at two.I know this because it has been in my calendar for three weeks, because I built the deck myself over four evenings at the kitchen island while Lucian read beside me and pretended not to be reading over my shoulder, and because it is the kind of presentation that under normal circumstances I would have been quietly confident about walking into.These are not normal circumstances.I get dressed with the particular focus of someone using routine as an anchor. Charcoal blazer. The silk blouse Sophia picked out last spring that she said makes me look like I own the room before I open my mouth. Low heels because I have learned, in two years of Lucian Blackwood’s world, that the days you need to look powerful are often the days you will be on your feet for six hours.Lucian is already gone. He left at seven with Marcus, something about the internal audit and a conversation with the compliance team that he did not give me details about and I did not push for.

CHAPTER TEN: THE RESULTS THAT CHANGE EVERYTHING

I call Dr. Carter from the car.Her receptionist answers on the second ring and I give my name and she puts me on hold for forty seconds and then Dr. Carter herself is on the line, which tells me she left a note somewhere in my file that says something like call immediately if this patient contacts us.“Mrs. Blackwood,” she says. “I’ve been expecting to hear from you.”“I need an appointment,” I say.“Today,” she says. Not a question.“Today,” I confirm.She gives me a time. Four o’clock. Her last slot. I thank her and hang up and tell Olivia to adjust the car’s route and Olivia does it without asking why, which is one of the many reasons I would be considerably less functional without her.The clinic is small and private and located in a building that looks like it contains only law offices and financial advisors, which I suspect is deliberate. The waiting room has three chairs and a magazine rack and no television, which I also suspect is deliberate. I pay for my appointment at the

CHAPTER ELEVEN: TWO LINES AND NO WORDS

I tell no one.Not Sophia, who calls at eight the next morning with updates about Isabella’s digital history and a voice that sounds like she has already been awake for two hours. Not Olivia, who suspected and said nothing and deserves the consideration of me saying something first. Not Evelyn, who surprised me in a corridor yesterday with honesty I wasn’t prepared for and who I am still quietly reassembling my understanding of.No one.It is not a decision I make consciously. It is more like a door I find already closed and decide, for now, to leave that way. Lucian knows. That is enough. Everything else is noise that I do not have the capacity for until I understand the shape of what we are already carrying.Ethan’s office is on the forty-third floor of a building on Park Avenue that looks exactly like the kind of place where important things are decided quietly and without ceremony. We arrive at nine. Lucian holds the door and his hand finds the small of my back as we walk to the e

CHAPTER TWELVE: EMMA COMES TO DINNER

The restaurant Evelyn suggested is called Maison Privé.It is the kind of place that does not have a sign outside, only a number on a brass plate beside a door that someone opens for you before you reach it. The kind of place where the lighting is always exactly right and the tables are always exactly far enough apart and the staff have been trained to be present without being visible.Evelyn’s idea of a controlled environment.I arrive before Lucian, which was intentional. I wanted five minutes in the room before anyone else filled it. I wanted to know where the exits are and which table we have been given and whether the staff have been briefed, because these are the kinds of things I think about now, in this life, in this year, when nothing is entirely without calculation.The table is in the back corner. Good sight lines. One way in, one way out. Someone on Ethan’s team called ahead.Lucian arrives at seven on the dot with Marcus two steps behind him, which I did not expect. I loo

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE BOARD DEMANDS A STATEMENT

The stock drops nine percent at market open on Monday.I know before Marcus calls because I check the ticker at six fifty-three while the coffee is still brewing and the number sits on my screen with the particular flatness of a fact that does not care how you feel about it. Nine percent. In one session. On the back of a paternity story that has now been running for five days and has graduated from gossip blogs to financial press, which is the moment a personal scandal stops being personal.Lucian is already on the phone when I bring his coffee to the study. He is standing at the window with his back to the door and his free hand in his pocket and the posture of a man who has been standing exactly like that for longer than I have been awake. I set the mug on the desk and leave without interrupting.By eight fifteen we are both dressed and in the car and Marcus is already in the Blackwood Holdings boardroom when we arrive, seated at the far end of the table with a printed sheet of numb

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: WHAT SOPHIA FOUND

Sophia arrives at the penthouse at noon with her laptop, a coffee she has already half-finished, and the particular expression she gets when she has found something that changes the shape of everything and has been sitting on it long enough that the pressure is becoming unbearable.She does not say hello. She sets the laptop on the kitchen island and opens it and turns the screen toward me.“Sit down,” she says.“I’m fine standing,” I say.“Ariana.” Her voice is the quiet version. The one she uses when she is not asking.I sit down.She pulls a stool around to my side of the island and sits beside me and points at the screen. “Isabella’s social media. Every platform. Scrubbed clean exactly thirty days before she walked into Blackwood Holdings.” She clicks to a second window. “I already showed you this. But here’s what I didn’t have yet.” She pulls up a spreadsheet, columns of dates and account names and what looks like employment records. “Isabella’s last employer before she went quie

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE MAN WHO KEEPS HIS HANDS STILL

Nathan Sterling has been with Blackwood Holdings for seven years.I know this because I reviewed his personnel file this morning before the meeting, not because I was looking for anything specific, but because I have learned, in the past two weeks, that the things you are not looking for are often the things most worth finding. Seven years. Promoted twice. Trusted by Lucian in the particular way Lucian trusts people who have never given him a reason not to, which is to say completely and without much examination.He is already in the small conference room when I arrive. Jacket on, files arranged, coffee at his right hand, the posture of a man who prepared for this meeting and wants that preparation to be visible. He stands when I come in, which is courteous, and smiles, which is warm, and neither of these things tells me anything useful because both are things a person can produce deliberately.“Ariana,” he says. “I didn’t know you wanted to go through the audit findings personally.”

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