บททั้งหมดของ The Billionaire’s Wife Does Not Exist: บทที่ 81 - บทที่ 90

Roman put the date on both our calendars before I'd even finished my coffee, complete with a title, Rule One Compliance, which I told him defeated the entire spirit of the rule. "The rule doesn't specify a tone," he said, entirely unbothered, and refused to tell me where we were going, only that I should wear something comfortable and not ask questions he had no intention of answering.I expected extravagance out of pure habit, some restaurant with a name I couldn't pronounce or a private booking somewhere that closed for us specifically. Instead he drove us to a small neighborhood place two streets from the townhouse, the kind with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu, and I stood outside it for a second just looking at him."This is it?""This is it.""You didn't rent anything.""I considered it beneath me."Inside, he pulled out my chair, then immediately ruined the gesture by checking his phone once we sat down, and I caught the screen before he could hide it. "Are you checking

“You kept something,” I repeated, entirely unconvinced. “You. The man who has a filing system for his filing system.” “Sentiment doesn’t require chaos.” “Sentiment usually comes with a little dust, Roman.” “I have staff.”He led me into the study once we got home, that quiet room he almost never let get messy, everything exactly where he believed it belonged. I expected him to produce nothing more than a story with no proof behind it after all, some clever way of winning the argument without actually winning it. Instead he pulled a small wooden box down from the top shelf of his desk, unremarkable, plain, the kind of thing you’d walk past in a shop without a second glance. But the way he held it gave him away immediately, careful in a way he wasn’t careful with almost anything else in the house, like it weighed more than its size suggested.“That’s not standard office storage.”“It has a purpose.”“Which is?”“You’ll see.”He set it on the desk between us and lifted the lid slowly, an

I turned the coaster over in my hands one more time before setting it beside the photograph, and something occurred to me watching the two of them sit there together, our early relationship reduced to a napkin, a ticket stub, a scrap of paper neither of us had planned to keep."We should start a new box."Roman looked up. "For what?""For this. Now. Not evidence we used to love each other. Evidence we're actually living."He considered that with more seriousness than the idea probably deserved, then went and found a small wooden document box from somewhere in his study, sturdy and plain, the kind of thing that had probably held nothing more interesting than old contracts until this moment. "This is good. Sturdy." "You're already treating this like an infrastructure project." "Everything worth keeping requires infrastructure." "You're impossible."We wandered through the townhouse trying to decide what qualified, and Roman's first suggestion was a spare key to the coffee machine, which

"You said practical clothing." "I said comfortable. Those are different words." "You knew what would happen." "I had theories." He looked down at his sleeves, already rolled to the elbow despite his obvious resistance to the whole enterprise, and followed me inside like a man walking into a meeting he hadn't been briefed for.The instructor demonstrated the wheel with the kind of casual competence that made it look effortless, clay rising smoothly between her hands into something resembling an actual bowl, and Roman watched with the intense focus he usually reserved for quarterly earnings. "That looks manageable." "It is not manageable." "You've never tried it." "I know myself."I was right. Within thirty seconds his clay had gone lopsided, listing hard to one side like a building mid-collapse, and he stared at it with genuine betrayal, as if the material itself had personally failed to meet expectations. "It was centered." "It was not centered." "The instructor said it was centered."

I answered on the third ring, Roman still close enough that I could feel him not-quite listening, pretending sudden interest in the bowl he'd been trying to relocate all evening."Sorry, I know it's late," Adrian said, no preamble, straight into the problem the way he always was. "The Hendricks panel. The one we flagged for the humidity issue last month. The reading spiked again tonight and I don't trust myself to make the call on whether we pull it or leave it another week.""How high?"He gave me the number, and I felt myself shift automatically into the part of my brain that lived for exactly this kind of problem, running through the material, the timeline, the risk of moving it versus the risk of leaving it exposed. Roman watched me change in real time, laughing wife dissolving into something more precise, more certain, and I caught him noticing without saying anything about it."Pull it," I said. "Tonight if you can get someone in, tomorrow morning at the latest. That reading's c