Lahat ng Kabanata ng SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

I did not sleep well.This was not unusual, technically speaking. I had never been a particularly gifted sleeper — my mind ran long after the rest of me wanted to stop, cataloguing the day's inventory, revising conversations, noticing the things I hadn't had time to notice while they were happening. Renee called it my greatest professional asset and my worst personal liability, and she was right on both counts. The bakery existed in large part because of the way my brain refused to shut off at reasonable hours. Some of my best recipes had been written at two in the morning on whatever paper was nearest.But this was not that kind of sleeplessness.This was the kind where I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and replayed, with the involuntary precision of a mind that had decided this was urgent, the exact quality of light in the Calloways' dining room when Marcus had looked at his own hand and said, I'm engaged.The ring. Gold band, simple, the kind chosen by someone who didn't

I had a rule about the bakery.It was a simple rule, one I had maintained without difficulty for three years since Renee and I had opened the place: no personal drama inside these walls. The bakery was work, and work was clean, and clean meant that whatever was happening in the complicated interior landscape of my personal life stayed outside on the sidewalk where it belonged.I was very committed to this rule.Which was why, when the bell above the front door chimed at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning and I looked up from the croissant dough I was laminating and saw Marcus Calloway walk in, I experienced a brief, specific internal collapse that I immediately classified as a violation of my own policy.He stood in the doorway for a moment, taking in the space — the glass cases, the warm light, the chalkboard menu Renee had rewritten last week in her precise, architectural handwriting. He was in a dark coat, the kind of Tuesday-morning put-together that suggested he had a meeting somewhere la

I made the decision on a Sunday.Not dramatically. There was no moment of thunder, no cinematic clarity, no sudden conviction arriving like a weather front moving in from the ocean. It happened the way most honest things happened — quietly, in an ordinary place, while I was doing something completely unrelated.I was reorganising the storage room at the back of the bakery.It was the kind of task I saved for Sundays when the shop was closed — methodical, physical, requiring just enough attention to keep the front of my mind occupied while the back of it did what it wanted. I was moving flour sacks and relabelling spice jars and making a list of what needed ordering, and somewhere between the vanilla extract and the cardamom I stopped moving and stood in the middle of the small cluttered room and thought, with sudden complete clarity: I am going to stop pretending.Not stop pretending to everyone else. I was accomplished at that and it had served me adequately for four years.Stop pret

The thing about intelligent women was that they noticed everything.I had understood this about Isabelle Ferreira from the moment I met her — from the way she listened at that first Sunday brunch, the quality of her attention, the precision of her questions. She was a corporate attorney who argued complex cases in front of rooms full of people whose job it was to find holes in her reasoning. She had spent years training herself to see what was actually happening beneath the surface of what was being presented.Which meant that whatever I thought I was concealing, I was probably concealing approximately half of it.I thought about this on the subway ride home from the Calloway dinner party, sitting with my coat in my lap and the Friday night city rushing past the dark windows. I thought about the look I had caught on her face during the restaurant disagreement — that small, careful thing moving behind her composure. I thought about the way her eyes had tracked between Marcus and me at

Jade Calloway had two modes when she suspected something.The first was direct — she asked the question plainly, looked you in the eye, and waited with the particular patience of someone who had decided they were going to get an answer and the only variable was how long it took. This mode was efficient and slightly terrifying and most people capitulated within thirty seconds.The second was oblique — she circled the thing, approached it from angles, asked questions that were technically about something else but were actually about the thing, until the person she was talking to either confessed voluntarily or found themselves so thoroughly cornered that confession felt like their own idea.I had known Jade for eleven years. I knew both modes intimately. I could see them coming from a distance the way you could see weather moving in over the water — the particular quality of light before it changed.She was in mode two on Sunday.We were at brunch — just the two of us, our regular place