All Chapters of Married to the Wrong Billionaire : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Catherine arrived on a Wednesday with a rolling suitcase and a sketchbook visible in her jacket pocket and the specific uprightness I'd been expecting since February, except warmer this time, the uprightness of someone arriving somewhere they'd been looking forward to rather than approaching with caution.Caiden met her at the station. I went to the pharmacy because that was the right thing — their first time alone since the café in February, without the neutral ground of a corner table and two hours of careful introduction. Some things needed space to happen without witnesses.He texted at noon. *We're at the site.*I smiled at the pharmacy counter and helped the next customer.---They were still at the site when I arrived at two.Catherine was walking the perimeter the way Caiden had walked it in January, the same pace, the same thoroughness, the same stops at the corners where something about the light or the proportions required more attention. The structural frame was fully up n

Rachel called on a Sunday morning while I was reading on the window seat and Caiden was in the office with the school drawings, the particular Sunday quiet of an apartment where two people were doing their own things in comfortable parallel.She didn't open with a question. She opened with: "I told him."I set the book down. "Told who what.""My husband," she said. "About the payments. The anonymous pharmacy grant. That it was you, the whole time, two years of it." A pause. "I told him last night.""How did he receive it," I said."Badly at first," she said. "Then worse. Then—" she stopped. "Then he went very quiet and he stayed quiet for about an hour and then he said he owed you an apology and that he didn't know how to make one that was sufficient." She paused. "I didn't tell him he was right. I didn't tell him he was wrong. I just said that sufficient wasn't the standard — honest was."I looked at the city outside the window. The Sunday morning version of it, slower than weekdays,

Edinburgh was grey and specific and completely itself.Not grey in the apologetic way of cities that couldn't manage better — grey in the deliberate way of a place that had decided its character a long time ago and had been committed to it ever since. Stone buildings the color of old certainty. Streets that went uphill without apologizing for it. A sky that did extraordinary things with light despite — or because of — the cloud cover, catching the July afternoon in ways that warmer cities never managed.Catherine met us at the station.She was in her work clothes — not formal, just the clothes of someone who had come from a site or an office and hadn't stopped to change because stopping to change hadn't occurred to her. A jacket with a pen mark on the left cuff. The sketchbook in the pocket. The specific uprightness.She looked at Caiden first, the way she always did, the two-second calibration that I understood now as the recalibration of someone who had twenty-three years of absence

I woke up with a ring on my finger that fit exactly and a man beside me who had been paying attention in ways I hadn't known about and the specific quality of an August morning that understood it was significant without making a production of it.Caiden was already awake. Not up — awake, lying with the specific stillness of someone whose brain had started before the rest of them had agreed to. He was looking at the ceiling with the expression he had when he was inside a thought that required the early morning to work through properly."The ceiling," I said.He turned to look at me. "Mm.""You're doing the ceiling thing," I said. "What are you thinking about.""The school entrance," he said.I looked at him. "You proposed last night and you're thinking about the school entrance.""The proposal is decided," he said. "The school entrance still has an unresolved detail about the canopy position." He paused. "The canopy needs to be wide enough to shelter a child waiting in the rain but not

The question of the wedding arrived on a Sunday in October, not dramatically — it arrived the way most things arrived in our life now, sideways, embedded in something else.We were at Eleanor's. The soup was on. The table was full in the usual way — Marcus and Dana, the cat in its chair, Vivienne with her organized energy, Rachel seven minutes early, Arthur Mensah because Eleanor had decided his presence was non-negotiable and he'd long since stopped arguing with Eleanor about anything.Catherine was there. She'd extended the September visit by three weeks, which she'd presented to Siobhan and Piotr at the Edinburgh practice as a site visit necessity and which was, in the part that mattered, something closer to not wanting to leave yet. Siobhan had said fine. Piotr had not looked up from his desk. Jean had sent a card that said *stay as long as you need* which Catherine had shown me with the expression of someone receiving something they hadn't expected.Eleanor served the soup. The t