All Chapters of Just One Year With Mr. Billionaire: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

_Eden’s POV_Something was different. I noticed it the way I noticed most things, quietly, at the edges, without making it the center of anything. A shift in the atmosphere of the house that I couldn’t immediately name but couldn’t ignore either. Danica had stopped. Not stopped as in gone, or unwell, or anything I needed to act on. She was there. I heard her in the mornings. I saw her occasionally at breakfast when our schedules overlapped. She was eating properly, moving carefully, doing everything she was supposed to do. She had just… stopped doing the other things. She wasn’t waiting anymore. I understood this without being able to point to a single specific evidence. It was the absence of something rather than the presence. The light under her door that used to stay on late was now off by ten. The way she used to look up when I walked into a room was now simply not happening. She looked up, registered me, and looked back at whatever she was doing with the same expression she’

_Author’s POV_Freya had been gone eleven minutes.She knew because guilt had made her start counting somewhere around minute four, when her cousin’s story showed no signs of ending and her mind kept drifting back to the booth where she had left a pregnant, newly composed, suspiciously relaxed Danica with two empty glasses and no supervision.She ended the call and turned around, unable to take it anymore.But to her surprise, the booth was empty.Her heart lurched before she spotted Danica near the exit, Eden Cross beside her with his hand at her back. Freya exhaled slowly, but then she panicked because Eden had found them.It meant the driver had talked, which meant Danica was going to have feelings about that tomorrow.But tomorrow was tomorrow.Freya smoothed the front of her dress and started navigating back through the crowd toward the bar to settle their tab before leaving.She was almost there when she felt it.A hand. On her arm. It wasn’t accidental, not the casual brush of

_Freya’s POV_The next day, I remembered what day it was.And I almost didn’t go.I stood in my kitchen on Saturday morning with the invitation in my hand and ran through the list of reasons not to. Traffic. The venue was forty minutes away. I had class I could theoretically be attending. My shoes would hurt. There would be a seating chart and I would be seated next to someone’s divorced uncle named Gerald.Then I thought about my cousin’s face if I wasn’t there, and I put the invitation down and went to get dressed.I wanted to be clear that I was not dressing for my mother. I was dressing for myself, in the sense that I was a person who had standards. The fact that I spent forty-five minutes on my makeup and selected the green dress specifically because it was the most difficult thing to find fault with, structured, elegant, exactly the right length, was entirely coincidental.“You look incredible,” Danica said, through the phone, we were on a video call while I was doing my eyeline

_Freya’s POV_Three days.That was how long it had been since the wedding, and Maxine and I had been texting. Not talking. Texting. There was a difference and it mattered, even if I was the only one who thought so. Talking implied something I wasn’t prepared to put a name to yet. Texting was just words on a screen. Anyone could do that. It meant nothing.The problem was that he was funny.Not in the way he was in person, where there was always a layer of performance underneath it, that crooked smile doing half the work. Over text he was dry and quick and oddly self-aware, like someone had removed the showmanship and left only the actual person behind. He sent me a photo on the second day of what he claimed was a business lunch and what appeared to be four grown men in suits arguing over a single document. He didn’t explain it. He just sent it with the caption: important work happening here.I had laughed out loud. Alone in my hostel.I was checking my phone more than I’d like to admi

_Author’s POV_Danica told herself she had misheard.She spent the whole night doing exactly that, building explanations, tearing them down, constructing better ones. The house had been quiet around her, the kind of quiet that had weight to it, and she had lain in the dark and worked through every reasonable possibility with the focused patience of someone defusing something they weren’t sure was actually a bomb. By the time grey morning light began pressing through the curtains, she had almost convinced herself. Almost. The word did a lot of work that morning.She came downstairs and Eden was already up. That wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the quality of the silence he carried with him. It wasn’t the comfortable silence of two people who had learned how to exist in the same space. It was the other kind. The kind with something underneath it. The warmth that had been building carefully between them over the past few days was still there, but it had shifted slightly.She asked