All Chapters of What We Pretended To Be : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Maria: The first thing Lily sends me the next morning is a photograph of my own public embarrassment. Daniel is on one knee. I am staring down at him like I have forgotten every useful thought I have ever had. The ring is caught in the light. His hand is wrapped around mine. It looks intimate. It looks sincere. It looks, to my great personal irritation, like I believed him. The headline underneath it is worse. “DANIEL ROTHFIELD PROPOSES TO MARIA WALKEK AFTER YEARS OF PRIVATE HISTORY.” I read it once. Then again, slower. After years of private history. Not sudden engagement. Not society alliance. Not strategic merger in couture. History. I sit up straighter, phone in hand, and feel something cold and precise settle into place. Morning sunlight spills across my bed, warm on the sheets but doing nothing to ease the chill crawling up my arms. That was what he sold them. Not an engagement. Not a convenient arrangement. A history. Something soft enough to romanticize. Something o

Maria: By the time Noah sent the second text, Daniel was already watching me. Not obviously, that was never his style. He didn’t reach or lean or ask too quickly. He just noticed, and somehow that was always worse than anything more obvious would have been. My phone lit up again. Noah: Can we meet? I stared at the screen a second too long, and Daniel set his coffee down. “You’ve gone quiet.” I slipped the phone face down on the table. “Noah texted. He wants to meet.” That got his attention in the smallest possible way. Nothing dramatic, just stillness, the kind that always meant he was thinking too much and saying too little. He nodded once, like I had confirmed something inconvenient, then stood and reached for his coat. “Don’t.” “That wasn’t a suggestion.” “It was advice.” “You have a very strange way of giving it.” “And you have a very consistent habit of ignoring useful things.” He held my chair out for me anyway, calm as ever, and I stood slowly, already irritat

Maria: Three days after the engagement, I learned two things very quickly. The first was that people became deeply invested in your personal life the second a ring appeared on your finger. The second was that half of them would absolutely use a sick pet as an excuse to ask invasive questions with a straight face. By Wednesday the clinic had become unbearable. A woman brought in a perfectly healthy golden retriever, let me examine him for ten full minutes, then asked if Daniel Rothfield was as attractive in person as he looked in photographs. A man with a cat who very clearly just needed less food spent more time congratulating me than listening to anything I said about his pet’s diet. One woman came in, looked at my hand before she looked at my face, and asked if the wedding would be before summer. By noon I had handed my schedule to Ada and given up entirely. She took the file from me, scanned the afternoon bookings, and looked at me over the top of it. “Congratulations. You’re of

Maria: He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The room behind him was still warm and loud and comfortably careless. Glasses clinked. Someone laughed too hard at something Marcus had probably said. My mother was still talking to Daniel’s mother with the kind of intensity usually reserved for political negotiations and floral arrangements. Nothing had changed. And yet somehow everything had. I looked at him, then at the phone in his hand. He turned the screen toward me just enough. “WALKER HEIR SEEN WITH SUSPECTED EX BOYFRIEND, NOAH. CLOSURE TALK OR REKINDLING?” Another headline sat beneath it. “WALKER HEIR SEEN IN PRIVATE PARK WITH RUMORED EX WHILE ENGAGED TO ROTHFIELD BILLIONAIRE SON.” For one brief, ugly second, all I could think was Evelyn. Of course. Of course she had smiled like that. Of course her surprise had arrived dressed as gossip and timed for maximum damage. I lifted my head and found her across the room. Champagne in one hand. That same pol

Maria: For a while after Daniel stopped speaking, the room stayed still. Not tense, not calm either — just spent. Whatever sharpness had been left in the argument had burned itself out somewhere between his silence and mine, and what remained was quieter than anger and heavier than either of us seemed interested in naming. I sat at the edge of the bed with half my hair still pinned and the weight of the day still clinging to me, and watched my husband pour himself another drink like the motion mattered more than the glass. He looked tired in a way I had never seen on him before. Less polished, less composed, like holding himself together had become expensive and he was finally feeling the cost of it. I hated that he was right. I hated more that I had known it before he said a word. For a while neither of us reached for anything else. He drank. I took apart what was left of my wedding one pin at a time, setting each one on the bedside table in a neat little line like control could