MARRIED TO THE DEVIL BILLIONAIRE FOR REVENGE のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 81 - チャプター 90

**Nadia**I wore the green dress on purpose.Not because it was flattering, although my mother would have said it was. Because it made absolutely no attempt to hide what was happening with my body and I had decided, somewhere between the cab and the front door of the building, that I was done making things easier to miss.Three months of letters. Three months of careful deliberate paper-based communication that had been, genuinely, the most honest conversation of my life. And at the end of it I had agreed to this meeting and I had put on the green dress and I had not once talked myself out of either decision.That was growth apparently.The therapist's office was on the fourteenth floor of a building that was aggressively neutral in the way places were when they had been professionally designed to belong to nobody. Soft furniture. No sharp edges. Art on the walls that was interesting enough to look at without making anyone feel anything specific about it. I appreciated the commitment

**Nadia**Not dramatically. Not a flinch or a jerk or anything that would have read as theatrical. Just his hand leaving mine quietly, deliberately, and then him sitting back in his chair with the particular stillness of a person who had just been ambushed by their own nervous system and was trying to figure out what to do about it.I let him have the space.The baby had gone quiet again, which felt like impeccable timing, like she had made her point and was done with the whole situation. Very efficient. Possibly the most Marcello thing about her so far.Dominic had his hands in his lap now. Looking at them. Then at the window. Then at some middle distance that wasn't quite either."That's not—" He stopped. Tried again. "That was a lot.""I know.""I don't mean the kick. I mean all of it." He pressed his hands flat on his thighs. "The last ten minutes. The whole thing.""Also I know."He looked at me. Something working behind his eyes that I recognized from the letters. The processing

**Nadia**The first date was his idea and my terms.That was how we negotiated things now, which was new enough that I still noticed it. He suggested. I shaped it. Nobody pretended the other person didn't have a preference. It was a remarkably functional system for two people who had spent the better part of a year being terrible at exactly this.He picked a restaurant that was not the kind he used to pick.No private rooms. No staff who knew his name before he walked in. No table that had been held for an hour because the reservation had been made under a name that meant something in this city. Just a good restaurant on a normal street with lighting that was warm without being strategic and a menu written on a chalkboard that someone had clearly done by hand.I noticed all of that before I sat down.I noticed him noticing me notice it."Raffael picked it," he said."Sure he did."The corner of his mouth moved. "He did.""Then Raffael has excellent instincts and you had the good sense

**Nadia**I hired someone to help and then sent her home after two hours because she kept asking what I wanted and I kept not being able to explain it.The penthouse had been Dominic's before it was ours and before it was mine and before it became the place I left and the thing about spaces that have been someone else's first is that they hold that original shape even when you try to fill them differently. I had lived there for months and it had never quite felt like mine. Too deliberate. Too controlled. Every object in its place because someone had decided it belonged there and that decision had calcified into permanence.So I redecorated.Not gutted. Not erased. Just quietly, over three weeks while the logistics of moving back were still being sorted, shifted things. Books on the shelves that were mine mixed with the ones that were his because we had not talked about whose books were whose and I decided that was fine. The throw blanket from Lisette on the couch in the main room beca

**Nadia**It was a Tuesday.That was the first thing I noticed. Not a significant Tuesday. Not an anniversary or a birthday or any of the dates that had accumulated meaning over the course of the last year. Just a regular Tuesday morning with the particular quality of regular Tuesday mornings, coffee brewing, gray light coming through the kitchen window, Dominic at the counter reading something on his phone and me at the table with my feet up on the chair across from me because my ankles had developed opinions about gravity that I was not in a position to argue with.Twenty-nine weeks. The baby had recently discovered she could use my ribcage as a percussion instrument and was making full use of that discovery.I was eating toast.He put his phone down.I noticed that the way I noticed things about him now, not with the old vigilance, not the monitoring that had once been about self-protection, just the natural awareness of a person who shared a space with someone and had learned the