The Billionaire Unscripted Wife

Chapter One: The Divorce

"Sign it."

Isabella was asleep when she heard it. The words came from above her, faint and low, and for a moment it belonged to a dream she could not hold on to.

She had been reading. She remembered that much. A long novel and a cracked screen and the last page, and then the tiredness that came after finishing a story at three in the morning. She had closed her eyes with the ending still in her head.

Then the voice came again, and she opened her eyes.

A man stood over the bed.

He had not turned on the lamp, and the only light in the room came through the curtains from the window, thin and gray, the last of the evening pressed against the glass.

It caught the hard line of his jaw and gray eyes, and it made him look like a man carved out of something cold. He wore a dark suit with the jacket open, as though he had come straight from his office and had not thought about changing before he woke his wife.

She knew that face.

She had spent four days with it. It was on the cover of the book she had just finished, and it was in every chapter of it, and it belonged to a man named Zachery Perry.

Her first thought was that she was still dreaming. Her second thought arrived when she looked down and saw hands that were not her hands and a diamond ring on a finger that had never worn one.

Then the golden script flickered at the edge of her sight.

She knew those letters. It was the story she had read in her own world, the story of Isabella Daniels, the obsessive wife who died alone on the pier while Zachery married another woman. She knew the two years of it, the way a woman chased a man down every hallway in this place and never once caught him.

The knowledge landed in her chest like cold water and settled there.

She understood everything in the space of a single breath.

And under the shock, quiet and steady and entirely unexpected, something else moved in her chest. An anticipation. She had read the whole book. She knew the page this moment came from. She knew how it ended, and she knew, with a certainty that made her fingers curl into the blanket, that she was not going to let it end that way.

"Divorce," Zachery said. "The papers are here. I want this finished as soon as possible."

He dropped a folder onto the blanket beside her knee. A pen lay on top of it, and it rolled a little and stopped against her hand.

Isabella sat up slowly. Her chest pulled toward him, and that was the body's doing and not her own, and she ignored it. She looked at the man who had been her husband for two years and who had come into her bedroom in the dark to end it, and she felt something she had not expected to feel.

It was relief.

"All right," she said.

Zachery did not move. His face stayed exactly as it was, which was the same mask he wore in every room of this house, but something behind it shifted. She could see it in the way his jaw set and the way his breath caught and then went on.

"What did you say?"

"I said all right." She opened the folder and turned to the last page. "Is there anything else you need from me?"

He watched her pick up the pen.

"You are not going to ask me why," he said.

"No, I am not."

"You are not going to ask me where I have been all night."

"No, I am not."

"Two years," he said, and his voice was still level, though it had tightened at the edges, "and you are going to sit there and sign the papers without hesitation."

Isabella wrote her name.

It came out in the same neat, small handwriting that had gone onto the marriage certificate two years before, and she noticed that with a strange detachment, as though she were reading about a woman in a book. She signed twice more where the small yellow tabs pointed, and then she closed the folder and set it down on the bed.

The golden script hung behind Zachery's shoulder, waiting. It flickered once, the way a candle does just before it goes out.

She did not get up.

She did not cry, and she did not beg, and she did not ask him to sit down, and she did not reach for his hand. She stayed exactly where she was with her back against the headboard and her hands folded on the blanket, and she looked at him.

Zachery stared at her.

In two years she had never once seen him at a loss. He always had the next sentence ready before the last one ended, and he always knew which door he was going to walk out of. Now he stood over the bed with his arms at his sides and did nothing at all.

"Read it," he said at last.

"I read enough." She tilted her head and looked up at him. "You want the marriage finished. So do I. There is not much left to argue about."

He stepped closer, and now she could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands had curled slightly at his sides.

"What is your agenda, Isabella?"

"Agenda? What agenda?"

"You have never once agreed with me about anything. You have never once let me leave a room without a scene. You have followed me almost everywhere uninvited, and you have called my office until the line went dead, and now you walk into a divorce like it is a delivery receipt." His voice dropped lower, and it was not quite anger. "So I am asking you plainly. What do you want?"

"I want nothing from you."

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only answer you are getting." She picked up the folder and held it out to him. "Take it. It is finished. I will be gone before morning."

He did not take it, so she set it down on the bed between them and let go of it, and the small sound it made was the only sound in the room.

Then she swung her legs off the bed and stood, and she walked past him and out of the room.

The hallway was long and dim, and her bare feet were loud on the marble. She went down the stairs, and her hand slid along the rail without her telling it to. The house was quiet in the way houses are quiet when nobody inside them is happy.

The kitchen lights came on when she walked in. The room was enormous and pale and looked as though nobody had ever cooked a meal in it. She opened a cabinet, took down a glass, and filled it from the tap.

She heard him behind her before she heard his voice.

Zachery stopped in the doorway with his shoulder against the frame and his arms crossed, and he watched her drink. He did not speak for a while, and she let the silence sit there between them, because she had spent two years filling silences for him and she was finished with that.

"Where will you go," he said.

"Somewhere."

"That is not a place."

"It is close enough for tonight."

He looked at her for a long moment, and there was something working behind his face that he did not let out. She watched him decide not to ask the question he wanted to ask, and she watched him lose the decision.

"Who is he?"

Isabella looked up from her glass.

"Who is who?"

"The man." His arms came uncrossed slowly, and his hands went into his pockets, and his jaw moved once before the rest of the sentence came. "A woman does not walk out of a marriage like this without a reason, and I do not believe you would do it for nothing. So I am asking you. Who is he?"

She almost laughed, and she stopped herself, because there was nothing funny in the way he was standing in that doorway. He had spent two years not looking at her, and now he could not look away, and he was searching her face for the name of a man who did not exist.

"There is no man," she said.

"Then what changed?"

"I did."

He said nothing to that. She drank the rest of the water and set the glass down on the counter, and she looked at him across the island, at the gray eyes and the open jacket and the hand that had never once reached for her in two years.

"You are full of surprises," he said at last, and there was something in the words that was neither a compliment nor an insult. It was the sound of a man adjusting to a room that had changed shape around him.

"Yes," she said. "I am."

She walked past him and back up the stairs to pack.