Semua Bab The Billionaire’s Wife Does Not Exist: Bab 1 - Bab 9

The woman checking names at the door looked at my invitation twice before she looked at my face.“I’m sorry, I don’t see a Tessa Ashbourne on the list.”“Try Marlowe,” I said, my voice already unsteady. “Tessa Marlowe. I should be listed as a guest of Roman’s.”She scanned the list again, slower this time, and something about the way her mouth tightened told me she’d found my name and wished she hadn’t. She waved me through without another word. I told myself it didn’t mean anything. Lists got messed up. Assistants made mistakes. Tonight was still the night Roman had promised me, the night seven years of hiding finally ended.I spotted him near the front of the room, exactly where I knew he’d be. He looked the way he always did in a room full of people who wanted something from him, calm, unreachable, a man built out of composure. Then our eyes met, and for one second, that composure cracked open just for me, the way it always had, the way it always would. I started walking toward him

I didn't sleep. I spent the night on Marta's old sofa in the guest room I wasn't supposed to use anymore, staring at the ceiling, replaying Ruth's voice until it stopped sounding like words and started sounding like static. By morning, my phone had lit up so many times I finally turned the sound off, and when I turned the screen back on, I understood why.*UNKNOWN WOMAN INTERRUPTS ASHBOURNE ANNIVERSARY.**MENTALLY DISTURBED WOMAN CLAIMS TO BE ROMAN ASHBOURNE'S WIFE.*I clicked the second one before I could stop myself, and there it was, a photograph of Roman with his arm around Camille, both of them smiling for a camera that must have been taken minutes after security dragged me out. Her face. His hand at her waist. My name reduced to two words in the caption. *Unidentified woman.*I threw the phone across the room. It hit the wall and landed on the carpet, screen still glowing, still showing her face where mine should have been.My studio called forty minutes later. I almost didn't a

I stood on the sidewalk holding a phone that had already gone dark in my hand, and something in me went quiet in a way it hadn't since the ballroom.If I no longer legally existed, then I had nothing left to lose.That thought should have terrified me. Instead it steadied me, the way ice steadies a wound. I put my phone in my pocket and walked back to the studio, three blocks, not caring that my card was dead and my accounts were frozen and my name apparently belonged to no one at all.The key didn't work.I tried it twice, my hands shaking, before I noticed the lock itself looked different, newer, the brass still bright where the rest of the door had aged for years."Miss Marlowe." A man in a gray suit stood just inside the glass, another one behind him, both of them with the flat, practiced calm of people paid to deliver bad news politely. "I'm afraid you can't enter. Ownership of this business is currently under review.""This is my studio. I built this from nothing.""I understand

I let myself into Hartwell House with the old key I'd carried for years, the brass archive key tucked safely inside my coat pocket.I hadn't been back since before the gala. I expected it to feel different now, colder, like a house that belonged to someone else's marriage. Instead the small table by the door, the one Roman always said was too cheap for a house like this, was exactly where I'd left it. The reading lamp beside my old chair still sat at the angle I liked. A tiny scratch on the banister, the one I'd made moving a bookshelf three years ago, was still there, never sanded down, never fixed.This still felt like home.I hated that it did.I told myself I wasn't going upstairs, that the basement archive was the only thing that mattered tonight. My feet carried me to the master bedroom door anyway.I told myself not to open it. I opened it anyway.I expected Camille's things, her perfume on the dresser, her clothes crowding the wardrobe. Instead the room looked almost exactly l

Roman looked at the document in my hands, and something in his face shifted, like he'd been waiting for this exact moment since the day he'd signed it."Because the paper I signed isn't the paper you're holding.""Don't." My voice shook. "Don't you dare try to talk your way out of your own signature.""I'm not." He stepped closer, not touching me, just close enough that I could hear how careful he was being with every word. "Two years ago, the Chairman found enough evidence of our marriage to activate the original agreement. I had two choices. Let the trust recognize you publicly, which meant your assets, your identity, everything about you, under their control immediately. Or sign an amendment removing you from the family structure until I could break the trust's hold on all of it.""So you signed the second option.""Yes.""Then why is your signature on the version that erased me?""Because my signature was carried forward. Onto a version I never agreed to."I stared at him, my hand