All Chapters of I Married The Wrong Brother: Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

Everyone Already KnewNatalie’s POVI had gotten good at mornings.That was the part nobody ever understood about a marriage like mine. You didn’t survive it with one dramatic act of strength. You survived it in small, boring pieces. Making the coffee exactly the way Daniel liked it even when he wasn’t home. Checking my reflection before I left the apartment—not out of vanity, but because a wrinkled blouse or tired eyes could start comments, and comments always found their way back to him. And anything that found its way back to him always cost me later.Four years of this had trained me well. I moved through the apartment like a ghost who still knew all the rules—quiet enough not to wake Noah if he’d had a restless night, careful enough not to leave any trace of the exhaustion I carried. Sometimes I caught myself in the bathroom mirror and barely recognized the woman staring back. She looked composed. She looked like she belonged in the life she was living. I worked very hard to make

The Brother Who NoticedMarcus’s POVI had been staring at the same paragraph of a licensing agreement for eleven minutes when my assistant knocked twice and let herself in without waiting for an answer. That was how I knew, before she said a word, that something had already gone wrong somewhere in the company today.“You should see this,” Sandra said, and turned her tablet around.I didn’t recognize the first image for what it was. My brain simply refused the information for a full second, the way you might refuse to recognize your own house on fire. Then it landed, all at once—ugly and complete.“Take it down,” I said, already reaching for my phone. “Whatever site that’s from, get legal on it now.”“It’s not just one site.” Sandra’s voice was careful, the voice of someone who’d worked for me long enough to know when to soften delivery and when time mattered more than tone. “It’s everywhere. It’s been up since early this morning.”I set my own phone down on the desk, deliberately, be

The Room That Forgot HerNatalie’s POVThe Larkspur deck was due at two. I had the slides finished by eleven-forty.I sat at my desk with the file open, cursor blinking at the end of a sentence I had already rewritten three times, and told myself the work was the only thing I could control today. The numbers were clean. The projections were realistic. The visual hierarchy on the mock-ups was better than anything the satellite branch had produced in months.None of it would matter if the room decided it belonged to someone else.Gordon called the review for one-fifteen in the glass conference room. The same one Daniel had pulled me into yesterday. I walked in with my laptop under my arm and took the seat farthest from the head of the table, the place I had trained myself to occupy so no one would have to ask me to move.Daniel arrived four minutes late, phone still in his hand, the easy smile he used for clients already in place. He didn’t look at me when he sat down. He looked at Gor

Macaroni DiplomacyNatalie's POVBy the time Natalie got Noah fed, bathed, and settled at the kitchen table with a coloring book he'd long outgrown but still reached for on hard days, the apartment had gone quiet in the particular way it did most evenings — Daniel's absence a kind of ambient noise all its own, a silence with a shape to it.She stood at the sink rinsing the same pot twice, not because it needed it but because her hands needed something to do that wasn't checking her phone.It rang anyway, right on cue, the screen lighting up with a name that made something in her chest loosen for the first time all day."Hey," she said, phone wedged between shoulder and ear, hands still deep in dishwater."Don't 'hey' me." Maya's voice came through fierce and immediate, no preamble at all, which was exactly the kind of directness Natalie had needed since roughly nine that morning. "I've called you four times today. Four, Nat.""I know. I'm sorry. It's been — " Natalie glanced toward th

The AccountNatalie's POVThe card declined twice before the cashier gave me that look — polite, apologetic, faintly embarrassed on my behalf, the particular expression reserved for women who'd clearly been caught by surprise by their own finances — and asked if I had another method of payment.I did. A small emergency stash tucked into the zippered pocket of my wallet, a habit I'd carried so long I'd never once stopped to examine it, and I counted out crumpled bills in the checkout line while the woman behind me shifted her weight and studied the tabloid rack with sudden, elaborate interest.I called Daniel before I'd even pulled out of the parking lot, my hands still faintly unsteady on the wheel."My card got declined. In front of an entire line of people.""Oh." A pause, unbothered, the sound of a man reviewing something in his head and finding it perfectly reasonable. "Yeah, I moved some things around this week. Consolidated a few accounts.""You didn't think to mention that to m