CHAPTER TWO

Evi - POV

“I made it to the kitchen before my hands started shaking.”

Not badly. Just enough that I had to set the cup down on the counter and press both palms flat against the cold marble and breathe through it. One breath. Two. The kind of controlled breathing Calista had taught me back when we were nineteen and I used to fall apart over things far smaller than this.

“He was awake.”

After four years, two months, and eleven days — Evanthe Blackwood had opened his eyes and looked straight at me like I was the problem.

I don’t know what I expected. I had told myself many times over the years that I had no expectations - that I had made my peace with whatever version of this day eventually arrived. I had rehearsed the practical steps: notify the doctors, contact the family, step back and let the medical team do their work. I had been very organized about it in my head. Very sensible.

What I had not been sensible about was the four years that came before it.

I came to the Blackwood Estate twenty two years old and desperate for work. Not the kind of desperate that makes you reckless -the quiet kind. The kind that comes from watching your mother’s health decline and the bills stack up and realizing that your design degree and your pride were not going to be enough.

A private nursing firm connected me with the family. The pay was significant. The conditions were specific. I would live on site, manage his care around the clock, and be available at any hour. In exchange I would be compensated better than any other position I could have found at that age.

I said yes without hesitation.

The marriage came six months later.

The family’s lawyers explained it carefully - the heir clause in the Blackwood trust required a legitimate spouse to maintain control of the estate and the company during Evanthe’s incapacitation. Without it the board could move to dissolve his holdings entirely. They needed someone willing, someone already vetted, someone already present.

They looked at me across a very long table and made me an offer that had nothing romantic about it.

I told myself I was saying yes to the money. To the security. To my mother’s medical bills finally being manageable.

I signed the papers and slid them back across the table and went back upstairs to his room and sat in my chair and read to him the way I did every evening.

That was the version I told myself for about eight months.

Then somewhere in the second year I stopped pretending.

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no single moment I can point to and say, “there, that was when it happened.” It was slow and quiet and completely inconvenient.

It was the way I knew his breathing well enough to wake from a dead sleep when it changed. The way I talked to him on hard nights not because the doctors said it might help but because I wanted to. The way I had read him three complete novels and was halfway through a fourth and had started choosing books based on what I thought he might actually enjoy if he could tell me.

I fell in love with a man in a coma. Slowly, thoroughly, and without anyone to blame but myself.

I knew it was foolish. Calista told me directly the one time I came close to admitting it - she drove four hours to sit across from me at the kitchen table and tell me with all the gentleness she was capable of, which was not very much, that I was setting myself up for something I wasn’t going to be able to walk back from.

She wasn’t wrong. She was never wrong. I just wasn’t ready to hear it.

So I stayed and I loved him quietly and I told myself that when he woke up everything would sort itself out.

He woke up and looked at me like I was a stranger who had helped herself to his life.

I stood in the kitchen now and listened to the sounds of the house settling around me - the distant voices of his family down the corridor, the soft movement of the medical staff, the particular silence of a place that had been holding its breath for four years and was only now beginning to exhale.

My tea was cold. I didn’t make a fresh cup.

The way he had looked at me when he said, “for the estate,” like the answer was already obvious, like I was simply confirming what he had already decided - that look was going to stay with me.

I could feel it already, settling in somewhere behind my ribs alongside everything else I had learned to carry quietly.

I had two choices and I knew it standing there in that kitchen.

I could explain myself. I could sit across from Evanthe Blackwood and tell him the real story - the bills, the contract, the slow impossible inconvenient truth of what those four years had actually been. I could give him the honest version and watch him decide whether to believe it.

Or I could let him keep his assumption and give him nothing to use against me.

I thought about his eyes when he laughed - short and sharp, the laugh of a man who finds something beneath him rather than funny. I thought about how he had looked at me after - not with curiosity but with assessment. Not “who are you,” but “what are you and what do you want.”

I picked up my cold tea and poured it down the sink.

He had already decided who I was. Walking into that room with my real story would not change that - it would only give him the satisfaction of watching me try.

And there was one thing I had promised myself the day I signed those marriage papers, one line I had drawn quietly and kept without fail.

I would never beg Evanthe Blackwood for anything.

Not his belief. Not his warmth. Not his understanding.

My phone buzzed on the counter. Calista.

“He’s awake? I just saw the news alert. Are you okay?”

I stared at the message for a moment. Calista had news alerts set for the Blackwood family the way other people set alerts for weather. Practical and completely unsentimental about it.

I typed back: “He’s awake. I’m fine.”

Three dots appeared immediately.

“Evi.”

Just my name. That was all she needed to say.

I set the phone face down on the counter and looked out the kitchen window at the grey Blackwood grounds. The gardener was moving slowly between the hedges. The fountain near the east gate was running. Everything outside looked exactly the same as it had yesterday and the day before and every day for four years.

Everything inside the house had just changed completely.

I straightened up, smoothed my shirt, and picked up my phone.

I had a household to run. I had staff to manage and schedules to coordinate and a man recovering from four years of unconsciousness who was going to need more than he currently understood.

None of that had changed just because he had decided I was the villain of his story.

I had survived four years of loving him in silence.

I could survive whatever came next.