All Chapters of I Left Your Baby And Your Ring Behind: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Evanthe - POV“Four years of my life were gone,” and the first thing I saw when I came back was a stranger.She was sitting beside my bed like she owned the chair. “Reading,” relaxed, completely unbothered by the fact that the man lying three feet away from her had just returned from the edge of death.She didn’t gasp. Didn’t drop her book. Didn’t call for anyone.She just looked up, found my eyes, and said the two most unremarkable words in the English language.“You’re awake.”Like I had stepped out for coffee and come back twenty minutes late.I didn’t know her face. Didn’t know her voice. Didn’t know the scar at the edge of her jaw or the way she held her book with her thumb still inside it like she fully intended to go back to reading once this interruption was handled.Nothing about her was familiar, and yet she was sitting in my private hospital room at what appeared to be an ungodly hour of the morning, looking completely at home.“Water,” I said. My voice came out wrecked, fo

Evanthe - POV“Nobody tells you what it feels like to lose four years.”People talk about comas like they are a long sleep. Like you simply close your eyes on one version of your life and open them on another. Clean. Simple. A gap you fill in with paperwork and phone calls and physiotherapy sessions until everything lines up again.What they don’t tell you is that the world kept moving while you were gone. Decisions were made. Papers were signed. A woman you have never met in your life sat beside your bed for four years and somewhere along the line became your legal wife. And everyone around you treats this like a reasonable thing that simply needed to be explained properly.I was out of the hospital within three weeks.My doctors wanted longer. My mother wanted longer. I overruled both of them because lying in that bed with machines and sympathetic faces was making me feel like a problem to be managed rather than a man with an empire to reclaim.The moment my legs held my weight reli

Evanthe - POV“I was not supposed to want her.”That was the part I kept coming back to in the days after, the part that sat wrong no matter how I arranged it in my head.I had been clear about what this was. I had drawn the lines myself, plainly and without room for misinterpretation. A transaction. A legal arrangement with a defined endpoint. Nothing that required anything from me beyond basic civility and the patience to see it through.And yet.It had started three weeks after I came home. A Tuesday night, late, the kind of late where the house had gone completely quiet and the only sounds were the ones buildings make when they stop performing for the day.I had come to bed later than usual. The Harmon account had been bleeding problems all week and I had spent four hours on calls untangling damage my uncle’s management had allowed to accumulate.I was tired in a way I hadn’t been since before the coma. The good kind of tired. The kind that comes from using yourself properly, from