Semua Bab He Chose My Sister, So I Married His Enemy: Bab 11 - Bab 15

“What did they get?” I asked, the question still hanging in the car between us.Damien’s jaw stayed tight, his eyes back on the road. “Not tonight.”I wanted to push, but something in his face stopped me. He wasn’t being difficult. He looked genuinely troubled, in a way I hadn’t seen from him before, and I decided the question could wait.The next morning he told me we had a luncheon to attend, a small family gathering, nothing formal. I let myself hope it might feel like his grandmother’s house again, warm and easy, another place where I might start to belong.The house was beautiful, full of polished tables and quiet conversation, but it didn’t feel like his grandmother’s home at all. The warmth was missing. People glanced at me as we walked in, then glanced at each other, the way people do when they already know something about you that you don’t know about yourself.I tried to settle into it anyway. I smiled when introduced, answered the small questions people offered without reall

I almost let the call ring out. Then I remembered what he’d said in the car. You don’t have to believe me today. I answered.“Who is she?” No greeting. Just the question, sitting between us like the photograph still in my hand.Silence. For one second it frightened me more than anything the woman at the luncheon had said.“Where did you get that photograph?” Damien asked.He knew exactly which woman I meant.“Don’t move,” he said. “I’m coming over.”He arrived faster than I expected, calm but unmistakably tense, the kind of controlled urgency I hadn’t seen from him before. I set the photograph on the table between us before he’d even taken off his coat. It sat there like a third person in the room, watching us both.I watched his face when he saw it. Not longing. Not the soft regret of a man looking at someone he used to love. Pain, deeper than that, the kind that belonged to family.“She was my mother,” he said quietly.Shame moved through me fast, hot and immediate. I had built an e

The floor seemed to shift beneath me. Before I could speak, Damien folded the document closed.“Then they take it.”No hesitation. No pause to calculate what that meant.His grandmother’s eyes widened slightly. “Damien, think carefully.”“I have.” He looked at me when he said it.The clause was simple enough to understand, even through my shock. The trust his mother had spent years fighting to protect sat under trustee control. If Damien married someone the trustees rejected, his claim to it transferred permanently to whoever had benefited from his grandfather’s original mistake. Marrying me meant possibly losing, for good, the one thing he’d spent his adult life trying to win back for her.My fear came faster than any happiness. I thought about his mother, a woman who had paid for a choice that was never hers to begin with. I refused to become another woman standing in the center of that same sacrifice.“You cannot lose what she fought for because of me,” I said.“This is not because