Semua Bab His Accidental Mrs : Bab 111 - Bab 120

It’s funny how silence feels heavier than screaming.When I was small, I thought silence meant safety — that if you sat still enough, breathed quiet enough, the monsters in the walls would forget you were there.I know better now.Monsters don’t need noise.Monsters feed on the parts of you that never learned how to run.I’ve been gone for weeks.They say no one saw me slip into the river. Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re lying to themselves because the truth is too ugly: that they wanted to believe the water could wash me clean.It didn’t.I didn’t drown.I didn’t die.I ran.The money I stashed all those years ago — payments I skimmed from the trust, hush cash buried under dead names and fake signatures — that money bought me time.Not safety.Never safety.But time.I spent the first nights in motels with mold-stained carpets and curtains that didn’t close all the way. Places where people mind their own business because they’re too busy hiding from their own stories.Perfect.I w

When the video dropped, I was feeding Zaya pieces of cut mango at the kitchen counter, her tiny fingers sticky with juice, Micah perched on Adrian’s knee, babbling to his father about a cardboard rocket ship they’d made out of delivery boxes.It was quiet.For a moment, it almost felt like we were normal.Then Vanessa’s name flashed on my phone.One word: “Play it.”Attached was the link.Adrian glanced at me, reading the panic in my eyes. He set Micah down so gently you’d think the boy was made of glass. Zaya squealed when the mango slipped from my hand onto the floor.But the world had already slipped too.I played it once. Then again. And again.The old man’s voice — Adrian’s father — rolling out of the speakers like poison wrapped in silk.If she won’t marry you, get the other one. Vaughan needs an heir more than it needs a happy bride.I looked at my husband.He looked at the wall behind me, as if the paint might peel away and reveal a door to a world where his father hadn’t se

By the time I get back to the city, dawn is dissolving behind the skyline. The city’s waking up with the same blind faith that money and silence still run everything. I envy it — that illusion of order.In the passenger seat, my phone buzzes again.Consuelo.“Tell me something good,” I say before she can speak.Her voice is all business. “Tara signed the deposition?”“Signed, recorded, timestamped, and filed. She’s in lockdown until the hearing. Nobody gets to her unless I say so.”“Good,” she says. “Because Eliora just called an emergency press briefing. She’s going to stand on a stage in about four hours and tell the world you stole her child. That Lucian is the true Vaughan heir. That you forced her into hiding and threatened to have her killed if she didn’t vanish.”I bark a humorless laugh. “Same old script.”“Same old liar,” Consuelo says. “We’re ready on our end. Vanessa has the counterstatement prepped. We drop the deposition as soon as Eliora opens her mouth.”“And the DNA pr

The courtroom felt like a tomb when we walked in.No cameras. No whispers this time. Just the hush of air conditioning, the creak of old benches, the sharp shuffle of papers that meant lives were about to be stripped bare.Eliana squeezed my hand before we sat. She looked calm, but I felt the tremor in her fingers — small, hidden things we no longer pretended to hide from each other.Consuelo sat two rows behind us, tablet balanced on her knee. Vanessa leaned forward, eyes locked on the opposing counsel like she could chew through marble with her teeth if she had to.And across the aisle, Eliora sat.Draped in gray silk. Hair tucked under a scarf. A string of pearls at her throat like a noose she didn’t know how to wear. Her lawyer perched beside her, whispering something that made her flinch.When she glanced at us, her eyes slid over mine like oil on water — no contact, no apology, no shame. Just calculation. And beneath that, the spark of a woman cornered too many times who still h

I didn’t sleep that night. Neither did Vanessa. Or Consuelo.We spread every file we had across the dining table: birth certificates, visa records, half-shredded boarding passes, old social worker memos so faded the ink looked like a ghost.Eliana came downstairs once — barefoot, her robe falling off one shoulder, Lucian’s soft toy still clutched in her hand. She stood in the doorway and watched us sort through her life, his life, all of it written out in pieces that made no sense on their own.“You should rest,” I told her.She only shook her head. “I’ll rest when this house isn’t under siege.”Vanessa looked up from her laptop, hair pulled back so tight her temples were pale. “I traced the boarding pass to the foster agency. The name matches — Christine Andrews. They placed her in Ottawa. But she never stayed at the foster home they assigned her to. They filed a missing minor report six months later. It went cold.”“Then she reappears last year,” Consuelo murmured, tapping the secon