All Chapters of Married For The Show: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

RAINAI sat on my bed thinking about my life. Wondering how I was going to survive many more weeks of this nightmare.I felt intimidated, humiliated and neglected.Castor's condescending attitude towards me only grew daily.How much longer could I continue like this?The loneliness was enormous. Bigger than I had words for. The kind that sat in every corner of a room and followed you from one end of the house to the other. I missed my mother's kitchen. I missed the noise of small children and finger paintings and the particular chaos of a kindergarten classroom on a rainy day.I missed being someone whose life made sense.The tears came quietly. They usually did now. I had stopped making noise when I cried because noise invited questions and questions invited anger.I cried silently into my hands for a few minutes.I wanted to leave. To walk out of the this marriage and never look back.But I knew I couldn't. Castor wouldn't let me.Sylvester told me to fight back.I didn't know if I

RAINAThe very first time I saw him.He didn’t belong here.That was my first thought. Not because he was doing anything wrong. He was just… different.The room was loud, crowded, chaotic. Parents talking over each other, children screaming, yelling, running in circles, teachers trying to keep things from falling apart. It was messy and familiar.He stood in the middle of it like none of it touched him.Well dressed. Dark suit. Clean lines. Not overdressed, but enough to stand out without trying. He wasn’t speaking to anyone. Just watching.Watching the room.Watching the children.For a moment, I thought he might be a sponsor or one of the local officials who sometimes showed up for these things. But he didn’t have that forced smile most of them wore. He looked… calm, confident. Like he had nowhere else to be.Across the room, our eyes met.I looked away first.“Miss Gonzalez,look!” one of my students called, holding up a paper crown he had made.“That’s nice, Daniel,” I said, adjust

RAINAThe day after he came to the restaurant, I tried to put him out of my mind.It should have been easy. He was just a customer. A polite man who had stopped a small scene and stayed for one meal. That was all. I had served hundreds of customers in my mother's restaurant since I was old enough to carry a tray. None of them stayed in my head for longer than the time it took to clear their table.But this one did.I caught myself thinking about him on Monday morning while I was getting dressed for work. About the way he'd looked across the room when our eyes met for the second time. About the small pause in his voice when he said my name like he'd been practicing it.I shook the thought away and went to school.The week passed slowly.My students were extra restless. There was rain on Tuesday and Wednesday, the kind of rain that kept five year olds trapped inside and bouncing off the walls by lunchtime. By Friday I was tired in a way that sat in my bones. I went straight to the res

RAINAZoe's words sat in my chest for days.Men like that don't notice women like us by accident.I told myself she was being dramatic. Zoe was always like that. She was a blogger who wrote articles for a living. She saw stories everywhere. She found patterns in things that were just coincidence. She had warned me about boys in high school who turned out to be perfectly fine and predicted disaster about a roommate who became one of my closest friends.Zoe was paranoid by nature.That was what I told myself.But the words still followed me around. Through Monday morning while I was setting up my classroom. Through Tuesday during nap time when I had nothing to do but mark spelling sheets and think. Through Wednesday afternoon when I was waiting for the last parent to come pick up their child.By Thursday I had almost convinced myself to stop thinking about it.That was the day he came to the school.It was a little after three in the afternoon. The last children had been picked up about

RAINAThe supplies lasted my class three weeks.I rationed them the way my mother used to ration good olive oil. Slowly. Carefully. One pack of markers opened at a time. The construction paper saved for the projects that mattered most. The stickers given out only on Fridays, like a small celebration of getting through another week.My students noticed the change.They stopped fighting over the brown crayons because there were enough of every color now. They started taking better care of their work because they could feel the difference in the paper. Even Daniel, who tore through supplies the way other children tore through snacks, slowed down a little.I found myself thinking about Castor more often than I wanted to admit.He still came to the restaurant. Lunch on Mondays. Dinner on Wednesdays. The corner table by the window. My mother lit up every time the bell over the door rang and it was him.Sometimes he stayed an extra hour, just talking with her about the menu or the weather or