All Chapters of I WON'T MARRY A BILLIONAIRE : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Vivienne's POVI drove home.I made myself do it carefully. Both hands on the wheel. Eyes on the road. The specific deliberate attention of someone who understood that their mind was somewhere else entirely and was compensating for that by applying conscious effort to the physical task.I got home.I sat in my apartment.I did not call Charles.....This surprised me.Not the *not calling*. I had made a deliberate decision not to call him and I understood the decision and I had reasons for it that I could articulate clearly if I needed to. What surprised me was how certain the decision felt. How settled. Like something that had been made in a deeper part of me before the conscious part had caught up with it.I sat at my window and looked at the city and thought about why.He had admitted the one night.Voluntarily. In my kitchen with his hands folded on the table and the specific honesty of a man who had decided the complete truth was the only viable position. He had told me about Mar

Vivienne's POVI sat on the edge of my bed.The phone in my hand. Ella's voice still in my ear even though the call had ended. The dress behind the door. The city outside just beginning its early morning and entirely indifferent to what had just landed in this room.I sat there for a while.Not moving. Not reaching for the next thing. Just sitting with it the way you sat with something that needed to be fully received before you could decide what to do with it.The photograph was real.Maria had been pregnant four months ago.But the date stamp had been changed. Someone had taken a photograph from four months ago and altered the metadata so that it appeared recent. So that when Maria placed her phone on a café table three days before a wedding the woman sitting across from her would look at a date stamp and believe she was looking at a current pregnancy.Someone had built this.....I thought about what building this required.Knowledge first.You needed to know about the one night st

Vivienne's POVHe came back to the table.He sat down. Not across from me this time. Beside me. The chair pulled around the corner of the table so that when he talked he was talking to the room rather than to my face directly and I understood that this was how he needed to do it. Not performing the telling. Just saying it.I sat beside him and listened.....He started with Sophie.He said the name the way you said the name of something you had been carrying for a long time and had never said out loud in this particular context before. Carefully. With the specific weight of someone who understood that saying it here meant something different from the private way he had been carrying it.Sophie had been Louis's for fourteen months. Charles had met her at an event Louis had brought her to. She had been warm and interesting and he had liked her in the straightforward way you liked someone your friend had chosen. Nothing more than that.Two months later Louis had told him Sophie had ended

Vivienne's POVThe apartment had never held this many people.Not in the four years I had lived in it. It was a large apartment by any reasonable measure but it had always been a space for one person living deliberately and alone and the furniture and the light and the specific arrangement of everything in it reflected that.Today it reflected something else.Today it was full.....My mother had been up since six.I had found her in the kitchen when I came out at seven making the kind of breakfast that required multiple elements happening simultaneously, the specific organised chaos of a woman who expressed love through feeding people and had a room full of people to feed.She had looked at me when I came in.I had looked at her.We had not talked about Charles and Louis and the photograph and the metadata. Not yet. There hadn't been a moment and I hadn't made one because today was not the day for that conversation. Today was the day before my wedding and my mother was making breakfa

Vivienne's POV The alarm went off at six.I was already awake.I had been awake since four forty in the specific way of someone whose body had understood what day it was before the alarm had the chance to announce it. I lay in the dark and looked at the ceiling and listened to my mother sleeping in the next room and the city outside doing its early morning thing and the dress hanging in the corner of my room taking up space in a way I could feel even in the dark.I got up at five thirty.Made tea.Stood at my window.The city below was in its quietest hour. The particular quality of early morning before the day had decided what it was going to be. Clean and unhurried and asking nothing.I looked at the bracelet on my wrist.The coordinates catching the first thin light.I thought about a man who had put on an apron in a restaurant because he wanted to see if I was real before the money told me who he was.I thought about my mother's kitchen and chamomile tea and a warning that had be