Lahat ng Kabanata ng THE CONTRACT BRIDE’S REVENGE : Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

OLIVIA’S POV The Millbrook facility was nothing like the hospital back home.Everything here was quieter. More deliberate. The kind of place that had been designed to make sick people feel like recovery was not just possible but inevitable. Wide corridors. Natural light coming through large windows. Staff who moved without rushing and spoke without lowering their voices the way people did in places where they expected bad news.I had spent the morning with my father while the transfer team settled him in. New room. New monitors. New nurses learned his name and his preferences and the specific way he liked his pillows arranged. He directed all of it with the patient authority of a man who had decided he was going to be comfortable here and was simply informing everyone of that fact.I sat beside his bed and watched him come back to himself one small instruction at a time and felt something in my chest unknot that had been pulled tight for months.By early afternoon he was settled. Th

OLIVIA’S POV I woke up before my alarm for the first time since I could remember.Not jolted awake by anxiety or a phone call carrying bad news. Just awake. My opened naturally into the quiet of the room with the particular lightness that came from knowing the worst was not happening today.My father was stable. He was in good hands. The surgery was scheduled and the team at Millbrook was excellent and for the first time in weeks I had gone to bed without running numbers in my head or rehearsing conversations with doctors or lying in the dark calculating how many days were left on a deadline.I stretched slowly and looked at the ceiling.It was remarkable what good news did to a body.My phone vibrated on the nightstand. I reached for it expecting a hospital notification and felt my whole face change when I saw the name on the screen.Shay.I answered before the second vibration finished.“Hello? Shay?”“Girl.” Her voice came through warm and immediate and exactly like herself. “It

OLIVIA’S POVThe ceiling had nothing new to offer.I had been staring at it long enough to know every detail and it had not once told me anything useful. I sat up and swung my legs off the bed. I started tapping my phone against my palm again. Stopped. Put the phone down. I picked it up. Put it down again.I stood up.Then I started pacing.Three steps to the window. Three steps back to the bed. Turn. Repeat. The room was large enough that pacing in it felt slightly ridiculous but I could not make myself stop because stopping meant sitting with the restlessness and the restlessness was louder than I wanted to admit.I caught myself in the mirror on the fourth pass.I stopped.I looked at my own face.Hair packed up from this morning. Eyes slightly too alert for someone who had been trying to relax and watch a film twenty minutes ago. My Jaw set in a way I had not consciously arranged it.“Why are you like this right now?” I said to myself quietly.My reflection did not have a satisf

OLIVIA’S POV “Adrian.” My voice was careful now. Not cold. Just precise. “Why did you really call?”Another silence.Then he said it.“I miss you Olivia.” The words came out in a rush like he had been holding them behind his teeth and finally lost the grip. “I have missed you every single day. I cannot get you out of my head. I think about you constantly and I need to see you. Can I see you?”I sat on the edge of my bed and let the words settle.My ex fiancé. Married three weeks ago to another woman in a ceremony I walked into uninvited and stood in the back like a ghost while everyone around me celebrated. The man who had disappeared for weeks without explanation and reappeared as someone else’s husband without warning.That man had just called me at five in the morning to tell me he missed me.And asked to see me.I looked at my hands in my lap.I waited for it to hurt the way it would have hurt three weeks ago. The way those words from that voice would have completely undone me

OLIVIA’S POVThe gala was in four days.Jaden had mentioned it the evening before with his usual economy of words. A major industry event. Significant attendance. Required appearance. “The stylist will come on Thursday. Be ready by seven on Friday.”I nodded and said of course and went back to my book.But now standing in front of the wardrobe four days later in a gown that probably cost more than three months of my old rent I was having a quieter version of the same feeling I always had before these events.Am I ready to do this again?The answer was always yes because the contract said yes. But the question kept arriving anyway.Clara knocked at six forty five to tell me the car was ready. I looked at myself in the mirror one last time. The gown was deep green. Floor length. The kind of cut that did not need accessories to make its point. The stylist had done my hair differently tonight. Softer. Down instead of up.I barely recognized myself.Good, I thought. That might help.Jaden