All Chapters of My Husband Sold Me to His Blind Billionaire Uncle: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I didn't notice the day he stopped saying my name.I noticed when I couldn't remember the last time he'd called me Aria.It was always babe now. Or hey. Sometimes nothing at all — just a look across the room that expected me to understand. I told myself it was stress. I told myself marriages went through seasons. I told myself the man who once drove forty minutes in the rain because I mentioned craving a specific gelato from a specific place was still in there somewhere.I was wrong about all of it.Our first anniversary.I'd spent the afternoon making the table look like something out of a magazine — good china, candles in the crystal holders his mother gave us, white peonies because roses felt ordinary and tonight I didn't want ordinary. I wanted us. The version of us I still believed in.The lamb had been in the oven since four.Our song was playing.I smoothed the red dress — his favorite — and told myself tonight would fix whatever had been quietly breaking for months.The door o

I tried to leave at six in the morning.Not dramatically. No packed bag, no running. I simply got dressed, walked downstairs, and headed for the front door with the calm, deliberate energy of a woman who had made a decision in the dark and intended to follow it through before anyone could talk her out of it.I got as far as the entrance hall."The gate requires a code," Reed said, from somewhere behind me.I turned.He was standing near the staircase with a small silver tray and two cups of coffee, as though he had known exactly what time I'd come down and had prepared accordingly. His face was arranged in that careful, impersonal expression I was already learning to distrust."I didn't hear you follow me," I said."I didn't follow you," he said. "I was here.""Waiting.""Preparing breakfast." He extended the tray slightly. "Mr. Vale takes coffee at six-thirty. You're welcome to join him.""I'd rather have the gate code.""I'm afraid I can't provide that.""Can't or won't?"He conside

He didn't come down for dinner.Reed brought a tray to my room instead — soup, bread, something that smelled better than I had any interest in eating — and set it on the writing desk without meeting my eyes. I asked where Sebastian was. Reed said he was occupied. I asked with what. Reed said he couldn't say.I let him leave without pushing.Not because I'd run out of questions. Because I'd learned, in forty-eight hours, that pushing Reed when Sebastian had already closed a door was like pressing a bruise. It told you something was there. It didn't tell you what.I sat on the edge of the bed and thought about a five-year-old girl with her hand pressed flat against a window while the house behind her burned.I didn't eat much.I found him at midnight.Not by searching — the piano found me first, drifting down through the ceiling the way it had every night since I arrived, low and unhurried, each note placed with the kind of care that has nothing to do with performance and everything to

He didn't come to dinner.Not unusually — Sebastian's schedule had never fully aligned with mine, and Reed had long since stopped pretending to explain his absences as anything other than what they were: deliberate space, created by a man who understood that proximity had costs and was careful about when he paid them.But tonight the absence felt different.I sat at the long table with my food and the fire and the particular silence of a house that was listening, and I turned Damien's accusation over and over the way I used to turn a manuscript problem — looking for the weak joint, the place where the logic didn't hold, the sentence that sounded right but meant something else on the second reading.He engineered all of this for his own benefit.What I gain and what I owe you are not mutually exclusive.Not entirely wrong.Sebastian had said that. About Damien's conclusion. Not entirely wrong.I put my fork down.The honest version of the question — the one I'd been avoiding since the

I found it by accident.Or at least that's what I told myself for the first ten minutes afterward, before I was honest enough to admit that nothing I did in this house was entirely by accident anymore. I had been watching too carefully for too long. Every room I entered, I clocked. Every surface I passed, I registered. Editorial habit, yes — but sharpened now into something closer to survival.Reed had left a leather folio on the hall table.He'd been called to the door — a delivery, something requiring a signature — and he'd set it down with the absent efficiency of a man who had done nothing wrong and had no reason to think the person standing six feet away would look at it.I looked at it.Not immediately. I gave it four seconds, which was long enough to make the choice consciously rather than impulsively, and then I picked it up and opened it.The handwriting was Sebastian's.I knew it before I'd consciously registered how I knew it — the large, careful letters, evenly spaced, pre