Alle Kapitel von I WON'T MARRY A BILLIONAIRE : Kapitel 61 – Kapitel 70

Vivienne's POVIt was an ordinary Thursday.That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward. Not a special occasion. Not a date I had been anticipating or a dinner I had dressed for or an evening that had been arranged with any visible intention beyond the intention of two people spending Thursday together the way they had been spending Thursdays together for months.He arrived at six forty five with a bag from the market.I was already in the kitchen when he came in. I had started something simple on the stove, not because I was trying to cook before he arrived and took over, but because I had been home since five and my hands had needed something to do and the kitchen was where I went when my hands needed something.He came in and looked at what I had started and assessed it the way he assessed all cooking situations, quickly and without comment, and then put his bag down and washed his hands and came to stand beside me at the stove and we moved into the specific rhythm we had fo

Vivienne's POVMaya screamed.Not a small sound. Not the polite exclamation of someone who had received good news and was expressing appropriate enthusiasm. A full sound. The kind that came from somewhere genuine and arrived without any concern for the volume level or who else might be in the vicinity.Lyla, who was sitting beside her on my sofa, closed her eyes briefly and then opened them and smiled the specific smile she reserved for moments that confirmed something she had already believed.Ella looked at the ring for approximately four seconds with the focused attention she brought to everything and then looked at me and said, "It fits perfectly.""It fits perfectly," I said.She nodded once. Like this told her something important.Maya was still making noise.....I had called them that Saturday morning and said come over and given no other information and all three had arrived within forty minutes which was itself a statement about what twelve years of friendship looked like in

Vivienne's POVThey drove in from outside the city on a Saturday morning.Charles had told me about them in the way he told me most things about the people who mattered to him. Not in one sitting. In pieces. Over different conversations at different hours, a detail here and a memory there, until I had built a picture from the accumulation of small things rather than a single large disclosure.His father was measured and principled and had built something real and had known when to hand it over without holding on to the handing over as its own kind of power. His mother was warm and perceptive and had a way of saying the important thing so quietly that you heard it more clearly than if she had said it loudly.I had been looking forward to meeting them.I had also, in the honest part of myself that I didn't always advertise, been nervous.Not the performed nervousness of someone managing an impression. The real kind. The specific anxiety of wanting two particular people to see something

Vivienne's POVI had always believed that the wedding was not the point.The marriage was the point. The daily actual work of choosing someone and being chosen back and building something real from the ordinary materials of two people's lives. The wedding was one day. The marriage was everything after it.I still believed this.And yet.Standing in the venue we had chosen on a Tuesday afternoon watching the light come through the tall windows and fall across the floor in the specific way it fell at four o'clock when the sun had moved to that angle, I understood something I hadn't expected to understand.The day mattered too.Not more than the marriage. But it mattered in its own right. As the specific public declaration of something private. As the moment when everything that had been between two people in kitchens and cars and phone calls and restaurant tables stepped into a room and became a fact in the world.I wanted it to be right.So I made it right.....Maya coordinated.She d

Vivienne's POVShe came to my apartment.Not her office this time. My apartment. She arrived at eight in the evening with the full file in a folder and her laptop and the specific expression she wore when she had been thinking hard about something for several hours and had arrived at the point where the thinking needed to become a conversation.I had made coffee.We sat at my dining table.The table where Charles had lit candles on my birthday. Where we had eaten dinners and talked through evenings and built the ordinary texture of two people becoming part of each other's daily life.I sat on one side.Ella sat on the other.She put the folder on the table between us and opened her laptop beside it.She looked at me."Before I start," she said. "I need to say something.""Say it," I said."Some of what's in here I didn't show you the first time because I wasn't certain it was relevant," she said. "I want to be honest about that. I made a judgment call and I may have been wrong to make