My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 382

Chapter 382

Gianna

The glowing white screen of the tablet was the only light left burning in my dark bedroom.

It was way past midnight, and the rest of the house was completely dead and silent. I sat curled up in the middle of my mattress, my legs crossed tightly, staring down at the beautiful software Raphael had built for me.

With a soft swipe of my finger, a new page of my study notes glided into view. Everything was perfectly organized. The complex, heavy layout of the book had been broken down into clean, simple charts that my brain could actually understand without freezing up. There were no confusing walls of text, no crowded paragraphs to make my eyes swim. He had even color-coded the different algorithms, matching them to the exact way my memory worked.

I let out a low, shaky breath, a hot ball of anger tightening in my stomach.

I hate him. My fingers gripping the edges of the tablet a little too hard. I absolutely hate him.

I was still so incredibly pissed off at the way he had talked down to me in his office, treating our connection like a cold piece of paper and he had looked right through me, treating me like a crazy, fragile little girl who needed a therapist to survive. The burning sting of his rejection still made my blood run hot.

But as I scrolled to the next clean page, a heavy, painful ache swelled right behind my ribs, completely melting the anger away.

My throat went tight. The truth was, nobody in my entire life had ever done something like this for me. Nobody had ever sat down for hours and hours, staring at a computer screen, just to build a whole digital world specifically designed to help my struggling brain. My mother never cared how hard I drowned in school, she thought I was perfect the way I was that I didn’t need fixing but I did need help. But Raphael… Raphael had looked at my silent struggles, and quietly built me a lifeline.

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