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Chapter 32
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2026-08-05 21:43:34
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Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 41
January arrived with the specific quality of a month that followed something significant and had to justify its existence independently.The city went from decorated to ordinary overnight, the lights coming down, the streets returning to their default grey, the particular flatness of a new year that hadn't yet decided what it was going to be. I walked my route on the second of January and the fountain was still dry and the square was still patient and the bakery warmth was still there, unchanged, and I thought that the things that were genuinely consistent were more reliable than the things that performed consistency.Caiden was in the office when I got back, the building's structural drawings spread on his desk alongside the community spaces book, making notes in the margin with the small precise handwriting that had started appearing on everything. He looked up when I came in."Grace called," he said. "The building contractor confirmed the March start date. Everything is in order."
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 40
Christmas arrived the way it always did — faster than the calendar suggested, with more emotional weight than any single day had a reasonable right to carry.Caiden had never done Christmas with particular ceremony. He told me this on the nineteenth, when I asked about his usual traditions, and he described the last several Christmases with the specific brevity of someone cataloguing a thing that hadn't required much description — the company's staff event, Eleanor's dinner, a quiet day that involved more work than rest because quiet days without structure tended to fill with whatever hadn't been dealt with during the busy ones."This year is different," I said."Yes," he said. "It is."We didn't over-plan it. That felt right — the first Christmas of something new didn't need to be maximized, it needed to be real. Eleanor's dinner on Christmas Eve, which was established and non-negotiable and now included Vivienne and Rachel and Arthur Mensah who had been invited because Eleanor had d
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 39
Caiden went to see his father on the seventeenth of December.He told me the night before, not as a decision requiring input — the decision was already made — but as information he wanted me to have because that was how they operated now. He'd arranged it through the inquiry team's approved channels, a supervised meeting at a facility in the east of the city that handled white-collar remand cases with the specific neutrality of a room that had seen every version of a difficult conversation and had stopped having opinions about any of them."Do you want me to come," I said."No," he said. "This one I need to do alone." He looked at me. "But I'd like you to be home when I get back.""I'll be home," I said.---He left at nine. I went to the pharmacy, worked a morning shift, came home at one and made lunch and read on the window seat and waited in the specific way of someone who had learned the difference between waiting anxiously and waiting with trust.He came back at three fifteen.I
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 38
December arrived with the specific quality of a month that knew it was significant and leaned into it. The city put its lights up overnight, the way it always did, and one morning you walked out and the streets were different — warmer-looking despite being colder, the darkness arriving earlier but more decorated than it had been in November. I noticed it on my walk to the pharmacy and texted Caiden a photograph of the lights on the street near the dry fountain without a message. He replied: *Spring can't come soon enough.* I smiled at my phone and went to work. --- The inquiry had entered what Clara called the accelerated phase, which meant that the combined documentation from my father's drive, Edward's drive, Arthur's folder, and the Ashworth estate's parallel case had produced a volume of evidence that the prosecution team described, in a formal letter Clara shared with us, as unprecedented in scope and organization. Victor's legal team had filed three separate requests for de
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 37
My sister's name was Rachel and she arrived at the restaurant seven minutes early, which I knew because I arrived eight minutes early and she was already there, seated, with water poured and the menu open and the specific posture of someone who had been rehearsing a version of this conversation since Thursday.She looked up when I came in. The particular expression she'd had since we were children — half-relief, half-assessment, the face of someone who loved you and wasn't entirely sure what version of you was going to arrive today. I'd been giving her reasons for the assessment for two years. I was hoping to give her fewer going forward.I sat down. She said, "You look different.""Different how," I said."Less tired," she said. "Not just sleep-tired. The other kind." She looked at me. "The kind that was always there."I thought about Gerald on the pullout sofa ceiling. About two years of double shifts and forty-three thousand dollars and the specific exhaustion of a person who had b
Married to the Wrong Billionaire Chapter 36
Catherine wrote back in eleven days.Not email — a letter, handwritten, posted from Edinburgh, arriving on a Thursday morning in an envelope with her name on the back flap. Caiden found it with the other mail when he came back from an early land trust site visit, still in his coat, and he stood in the hallway holding it for a moment before bringing it to the kitchen where I was eating toast and reading something on my phone.He set it on the counter between us. Looked at it."Edinburgh postmark," I said."Yes."I looked at him. "Do you want me to—""Stay," he said. Not urgently. Just clearly.I stayed.He opened it. Two pages, the same as his letter to her. He read it standing at the counter, still in his coat, which told me he'd forgotten to take it off, which told me the letter had his full attention in the way that made ordinary things irrelevant.I watched his face. The controlled stillness of the f
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