บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire’s Wife Does Not Exist: บทที่ 71 - บทที่ 80

"Professionally, I'm still Tessa Marlowe," I told the journalist, and she accepted it easily enough and moved on to someone else nearby. Roman didn't react dramatically, just squeezed my hand once, quiet and restrained in a way that told me more than words would have. I spent the rest of the evening turning over the hope I'd seen in his face, unable to shake it.Once we were alone in the car, I asked him directly. "You wanted me to say Ashbourne." "A little," he admitted, and when I pushed, he corrected himself honestly. "More than a little." He didn't dodge it, and somehow that honesty disarmed me more than denial would have. "Wanting it doesn't make it mine to decide," he added, and that single sentence sat at the center of everything else he said that night.I asked why he cared so much. He told me he was proud I was his wife, and that hearing me use his name would mean something to him emotionally, not because it proved ownership or satisfied some public expectation, but because h

"Remarkable?" "Historic." "You were handling this conversation better five minutes ago." "Five minutes ago my wife was discussing imaginary ponies. Now she wants my children." I reminded him it was still someday, and he said he'd heard the word perfectly well, his body apparently just less interested in nuance at the moment."Why does this matter so much to you?" I asked, sensing something underneath the obvious. He didn't reach for succession or Ashbourne or any need for an heir. "Because you just told me you can imagine trusting me with something that important." I thought of the woman who once couldn't picture motherhood beside him at all, certain she'd only end up lonely inside it, and he said quietly, "And now you can picture it." That was what had actually broken him open, not desire, but the fact that I could finally see that future with him in it."I want you to know something before I enjoy this too much," he said, and when I told him that sounded ominous, he promised he wasn

We drove until the roads got smaller and the towns stopped announcing themselves, until Roman finally pulled into a place with a name I didn't recognize and a single main street lined with shops that had never heard of Ashbourne. He'd booked a small guesthouse instead of anything with a name that meant something, and the woman at the desk called him *dear* and asked if we'd want the room with the view of the garden, entirely unaware she was speaking to the Chairman of a billion-dollar company. I watched his shoulders drop half an inch, something loosening in him that I hadn't even realized was permanently tightened.We got lost almost immediately, taking a wrong turn down a lane that dead-ended at someone's fence, and Roman, who could navigate a hostile boardroom blindfolded, stood there completely stumped by a map on his phone that refused to cooperate. "This is embarrassing." "For you." "For both of us. You're married to me." I laughed until I had to lean against him, and he pulled

Every answer I reached for had a function attached to it, like a reflex I couldn't turn off. Restoration made me useful. Independence had kept me safe. Competence made people respect me. Even my routines were built around proving I could manage alone. "What did you used to do badly and enjoy anyway?" Roman asked, and I actually laughed at the question, because I couldn't remember the last time I'd let myself be bad at something purely for the sake of it.He turned the afternoon into an experiment before I could talk him out of it, driving us to a tiny pottery studio he'd apparently spotted the day before and filed away for exactly this purpose. "You're not choosing my hobby." "I'm choosing an experiment. There's a difference." I was skeptical right up until the woman running the class handed me a lump of clay and I realized within thirty seconds that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.Roman was, impossibly, even worse. His bowl collapsed twice, and when the wheel spun too fast

Roman didn't turn it into a ceremony. He simply sat beside me, close enough that our knees touched, and waited without saying anything at all while I read through the pages one more time, not because I needed convincing, but because I wanted to feel the weight of it properly.I signed Tessa Marlowe first, deliberately, my own name sitting alone on the line for a moment before I slid the document across to him. He signed Roman Ashbourne beside it, and seeing our two names together on that page affected me more than sharing a surname ever could have. Two years ago I'd sat with divorce papers I couldn't bring myself to sign, paralyzed by a marriage I couldn't leave. Now I sat beside my husband, completely free to walk away, and knew exactly what I wanted to choose instead.I didn't need a marriage I couldn't leave. I wanted a marriage I kept choosing not to.He lifted my hand and kissed it once we'd both finished. "Technically we already owned the house." "This feels different," I told h