All Chapters of Five Years As A DoorMat Wife: Her Time To Shine: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Chapter 41He didn't say goodbye to her. It felt, in the moment, like the safer option — better to slip out unremarked than to walk over and risk saying something that came out wrong, some sentence with too much weight behind it that Kate would file away and turn over later, the way she filed away everything, patient and sharp, until she found the shape of whatever you were hiding from her.The car was waiting at the curb. He got in, gave the driver a short nod, and let the silence of the back seat settle over him as the vehicle pulled away from the building and merged into the afternoon traffic.He exhaled, properly, for what felt like the first time since the meeting had started.The city moved past the windows, grey and ordinary, doing what it always did, entirely unconcerned with the small catastrophe of feeling he'd been managing all day. He let his head fall back against the seat and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to locate the version of himself that had existed yesterday

Chapter 43She had watched something loosen in him as she walked away. Not dramatically — Seris didn't do dramatic, had never once in the years she'd known him let anything show that plainly — but she'd caught it in his shoulders, the smallest release of tension, the posture of a man realizing, with something like relief, that the conversation he'd been braced for hadn't happened after all.It should have hurt more than it did. She'd expected it to, when she first started rebuilding this new version of herself in Paris — had assumed that watching him relax at her absence, rather than her presence, would be one of the harder costs of the honesty she'd promised to keep. Instead it had felt almost clean. She was not the thing he needed to brace against anymore. She had stopped being an occasion for him to manage, and had become, instead, simply a colleague across a negotiating table, which was a smaller thing than a wife but a far more comfortable one, and she found she did not mind the

Chapter 45"You're telling me," he said slowly, "that I was engaged to Silver Winters — that our entire marriage, the wedding, all of it — was never actually my choice. It was already decided. Before either of us existed.""The specific choice of bride was yours in form," Josephine said. "Silver was the eldest daughter closest to your age at the time the agreement would come due. The mechanism selected her by circumstance, not by our direct hand. But yes. The marriage itself was never optional. It was written into an agreement thirty years old.""And the debt," Seris said, the words coming faster now, something rising in him that he was trying and failing to keep level. "The accident. She saved my life, and I owed her, and my parents talked about honor, about tradition, about how I couldn't refuse a woman who'd pulled me out of a burning car — that was all — what, theater? A story built on top of an agreement you'd already made decades before either of us was born?""The debt was real

Chapter 47His grandfather studied him for a moment. "That's your business to manage, not ours. Provided the terms are met, we have no particular interest in who does or doesn't know the reasons behind them.""Good," Seris said. "Because if I find out either of you have said one word to her about Bridgerton Holdings, about any of this — I will find a way to make this arrangement considerably harder for everyone involved. I don't yet know how. But I will find one."Neither of his grandparents responded to that directly, though something crossed his grandfather's face that might, in a different man, have been the ghost of approval."Dinner is at seven," Josephine said, closing the subject with the particular finality she used for most things. "Your mother has had the kitchen prepare your favorite. Go rest before then."Seris left the dining room without another word.---He didn't rest.He walked the length of the upstairs hallway twice, past the rooms he'd grown up in, past photographs

Chapter 49She watched the screen for a full minute afterward, which she was aware was pathetic, and then set the phone face-down on her desk with more force than was strictly necessary, and made herself pack up her things and leave the office before she could check it again.The drive home did nothing to improve her mood. She checked the phone at every red light, which she knew was a bad habit and did anyway, and by the time she pulled into the driveway of the Bridgerton house, still no response had come through, and she had worked herself into a low, simmering frustration that she couldn't entirely justify and couldn't entirely shake either.Fine. He was busy. People got busy. It didn't mean anything.She got out of the car, went up the front steps, and let herself in through the front door, already composing, in her head, the mildly annoyed but not actually worried version of herself she planned to present at dinner.She had approximately four seconds to enjoy that plan before it f