CHAPTER 5

ELENA 

I followed Mr. Blackwood down the hallway, still trying to make sense of what had just happened.

You're hired. He said it like it was nothing not that I'm complaining but just like that?

He'd simply watched me feed his son a few spoonfuls of vegetables and decided, apparently on the spot, that I was the person he wanted in his house.

When we reached his office, he pushed the door open and stood aside just long enough for me to walk through first.

The room was enormous....dark wood, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking grounds I couldn't begin to guess the size of, a desk large enough to seat a small committee. He rounded it and sat. I remained standing until he glanced up.

"Sit."

I lowered myself into the chair across from him, spine straight, hands folded in my lap the way I used to sit across from my father when he was reviewing highschool midterm results.

He opened a file already waiting on the desk. "You're twenty-six."

"Yes."

"You were preparing to study medicine."

"Yes."

"You gave that up."

"Yes."

"Why?"

I hesitated half a second too long. "Personal reasons."

His eyes narrowed, just slightly. "What personal reasons?"

"I don't see how that's relevant to the job."

"Everything about you is relevant to the job." His tone stayed level, almost bored, which somehow made it more unsettling than if he'd raised his voice at all.

He tapped the file. "I already have your academic records. Your childcare history. Your references, your entire educational file."

"Then I'm sure you already know everything about me."

"I do."

"Then why ask?"

He closed the folder, unhurried. "Because I don't care what a piece of paper says about you. I want to hear it from you directly."

I looked away toward the window. "There isn't much to tell."

"There's always something." He leaned forward slightly, elbows on the desk. "Why do you want this job?"

"I need it."

"You could find work elsewhere."

"I know."

"Then why this position, specifically?"

I stayed quiet, because the true answer had too many pieces I wasn't willing to hand him. Because I have nowhere else to sleep tonight. Because I just signed away eight years of my life and walked out with two bags and absolutely nothing. Because staying still for one more hour felt like drowning.

"I love children," I said instead.

"That's your entire reason?"

"Yes."

"You'd relocate into a stranger's home, live under his roof, and care for a child you'd never met....because you love children."

"Yes."

He studied me long enough that I had to work not to look away. "You don't seem frightened."

"I am."

"You hide it well."

"I've had practice."

The word slipped out before I'd fully decided to say it, and I watched his eyebrows lift a fraction.

"Practice."

"It's nothing."

He didn't push....not yet. He opened the file again instead, scanning down a page I couldn't see.

"Your references are strong. No disciplinary history. No criminal record." He turned a page. "You've never been married."

Something in my chest went very still.

He glanced up, waiting for confirmation I didn't immediately give, and in that pause I understood something all at once.... Daniel's name wasn't on that page. Nothing was. No marriage certificate, no record of a wedding that six hundred people had watched happen, no trace at all of the eight years I'd spent building a life around a man who'd apparently spent those same years quietly erasing me from every document that could tie us together.

He scrubbed it clean. Not just divorce.... deleted me, the way you delete a file you never want to accidentally open again. Not a single trace left behind for a background check to catch, nothing for anyone to find if they went looking.

I almost laughed, and it wasn't a kind sound in my head. So that's how little you ever wanted me tied to you. Not just gone...unrecorded. Like I never happened at all. I thought to myself.

It didn't hurt the way I might have expected. If anything, it confirmed something I'd already understood in that bedroom weeks ago: I had never been a wife to him. I had been a liability he'd finally found a way to file away.

"No," I said, keeping my voice perfectly even. "I haven't."

Adrian's eyes lingered on me a second longer than the answer required, as though he'd caught something in my face I hadn't quite managed to hide. But he let it go.

"You seem unusually private," he said instead.

"Maybe I am."

"Why?"

"Because I don't think everyone's entitled to know everything about me."

Something close to amusement flickered across his expression..there and gone. "Fair answer."

He closed the file and stood. I assumed that meant the interview was over. Instead he came around the desk and stopped a few feet in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back slightly to hold his gaze.

"There's something else you need to understand before you agree to anything."

I waited.

"My son isn't an ordinary child."

"I gathered that."

"He's a five year old with selective mutism. He hasn't spoken in two years." His jaw tightened. "He doesn't trust people. The only person he consistently listens to is me."

I thought of Elias sitting rigid and silent while two exhausted women pleaded with him, and how he'd looked at me instead of past me.

"And yet he took food from you within ten minutes of meeting you," Adrian said, watching my reaction closely.

"I don't have an explanation for that."

"Neither do I." He returned to his chair, sat, and regarded me for a long moment. "That's why you're hired."

"Thank you."

"But." He paused long enough that the word hung in the air between us like something with weight to it.

"But?"

He opened a drawer, drew out a document, and slid it across the desk toward me without another word.

I looked down. My name sat printed at the top in clean, formal type. ELENA MATTHEWS. My eyes moved to the heading above it, and whatever I'd braced myself for, it wasn't this.

I looked back up at him. "What is this?"

His expression didn't shift at all. "I need you to become my wife."

For a moment I couldn't manage a single word.

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me."

My fingers tightened around the edge of the document. I had walked into this house looking for a paycheck....a way to survive the wreckage of my life long enough to figure out what came next. I had not, in any version of tonight I'd imagined, expected the man across this desk to offer me marriage like it was a line item on a business proposal.

And I certainly hadn't expected what he said next.

"I need a wife, Elena. And I think you'd be perfect for the role."