All Chapters of My billionaire ex-husband wants me back: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

Six years ago today, Damian promised to love me for the rest of his life. This morning, he left before I woke up, and I told myself that meant nothing.His side of the bed was cold, the kind that means someone has been gone for hours. No note. No kiss on my forehead, the one he used to leave even when he had early meetings, back when he couldn’t stand the idea of me waking up alone.Two years into our marriage, a Tuesday night, he’d come home early and found me making a mess of his mother’s shrimp recipe. He didn’t say anything. He just came up behind me, stole a shrimp straight off the pan with his fingers, and when I swatted at him he grabbed my waist and spun me around the kitchen like we were somewhere fancier than our own house, humming something off key against my ear until I was laughing too hard to be annoyed anymore.I held onto that memory like a hand I was afraid to let go of.Work has been insane, he’d said last week, three times, distracted, his phone lighting up his face

By breakfast, the house already looked like it belonged to someone else.It started with the flowers. I’d arranged those peonies myself two days ago, leaning them toward the window the way my mother taught me. Now they were turned toward the staircase instead, angled to greet anyone coming down from the study.“They looked better this way,” Celeste said, appearing in the hallway with a folder tucked under her arm. “Hope you don’t mind. More light hits them from this angle.”“They’re fine where they are.” I kept my voice light. Pleasant. The voice I used with vendors who overcharged us.“Of course.” She smiled, already walking past me toward the study. My study.How do you tell someone they stole your place in a room by turning a vase?By breakfast, it wasn’t just flowers anymore.Damian was already at the table when I came down, and so was she, sitting in the chair across from him instead of at the far end where guests usually sat. Where she sat now used to be mine.“Morning,” I said.

I don’t remember falling asleep. I remember waking to his sentence still running through my head, gray light pressing through the curtains like it had been waiting me out.She doesn’t need to agree. She just needs to exist.My phone buzzes. An email, no sender, no subject.PROJECT SOVEREIGNA photo of me leaving a pharmacy two years ago, the angle wrong for a stranger’s camera. One line beneath it.Enter access code to continue.Our anniversary. Denied. His birthday. Denied. Mine. Denied. Then smaller text, easy to miss.Hint: the date it began.Not the wedding. The proposal. I key it in, and the file opens.A medical report. My name. My birth date. Hormone panels I never had run. Genetic markers no doctor has ever spoken to me about. Page after page, dated across four years I didn’t know were being recorded.Then it stops.This section requires Tier 2 clearance.I click through twice. The same gray box answers both times. Someone has been building a version of my life I never agreed