All Chapters of One Year as Mrs.Carusso: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Megan's POVThe shop was my mother's dream long before it became our only chance of surviving. Three plastic tables, a counter that had seen better days, and a sign hanging above the door still reading Vanessa's Kitchen in peeling paint made for the perfect setup. We made sandwiches, coffee, whatever the people needed to get them through their journey to work — being right on the road leading up to Z Corporation ensured that we never ran out of customers. Suits came by every morning like clockwork, phones to their ears, not even looking up as they ordered and dropped exact change onto the counter, and it wasn't much, but it was ours, and most mornings, it was enough.I was behind the counter that morning, wiping a mug clean, somewhat listening to my mother hum as she flipped bread onto the small grill it had been set up on, when the bell above the door rang, harder than it should have.Two men walked in like they owned the place, and I recognized one of them immediately — the taller o

Megan's POVThe hospital wasted no time informing us of the news that we already feared. My mother needed surgery; her heart, the doctors said, had a blockage that had been building for years, waiting for precisely the type of shock that she had been put through that morning to finally announce itself.I sat in the hallway outside her room for a long while after they told me, staring at nothing, running the math in my head over and over again, no matter how many times it came out the same. We didn't have it. Not close to it. Every last coin we had ever managed to find was swallowed up by a debt that seemed to never shrink no matter how much we fed it.I don't remember deciding to reach into my bag. I remember only that my fingers found the card first — the one I'd shoved in there absentmindedly, still meaning to return it to whoever it belonged to once things had settled down.Mr. Arian Carusso.I turned it over twice, reading his name printed there in neat, embossed letters, feeling

Megan's POVI had two days to prepare for a wedding, which meant I had no time to process that I was getting married.The two days passed in a strange, quick and slow manner both. Arian's assistant, a brisk, unreadable woman called Priya, handled everything. The venue, a small private hall attached to one of the Carusso family's properties. The dress, handed to us at the shop the morning it arrived, still in its garment bag, my mother running her hands over the fabric like she was barely believing it was real. The guest list, which Priya informed me would be "immediate family and essential witnesses only," which I learned meant precisely six people.I spent most of those two days lying awake at night, staring at my ceiling, going through everything that had happened since the morning those men walked into our shop — my mother collapsing, the ambulance, the credit card, the confrontation, the contract, and now this. It didn't feel real. None of it felt real, not even now, with the dres

Arian's POVThe boardroom was already filled with people when I got there with Megan by my side, and the look on their faces when we entered told me everything. The conversations stopped, the chairs were all angled forward, and a dozen pairs of eyes were doing the math as to exactly how soon I managed to find a wife."Everyone," I said, taking my usual seat at the head of the table. "This is my wife, Megan."We got the polite greetings out of the way. Megan sat down next to me, her spine straight and hands clasped together. It was the same calm expression I'd seen on her face the day she sat across my desk and calmly laid out her own terms before she agreed to sign anything.The meeting started off fine for the first twenty minutes - reports, projections, the same business I could talk about in my sleep while Killian presented, and I interjected every time a discussion took a wrong turn. For a while, it was almost business as usual, with the only difference being that Megan was sittin

Megan's POVThe house had been different all day, and I felt it before anyone said a word to me about why.The staff moved faster than usual, polishing surfaces that were already spotless, arranging flowers in the dining room with the kind of care I hadn't seen them give anything since the wedding itself. Dorothy kept glancing at me throughout the afternoon with something that looked uncomfortably close to pity, though every time I caught her at it, she busied herself with something else before I could ask why.It was Arian who finally told me, an hour before dinner, standing stiffly in the doorway of my room like the words cost him something to say."Chloe's joining us tonight," he said. "I should have told you sooner. I'm telling you now."I already knew the name. I'd heard it in a hallway weeks ago, hushed and careful, a name the staff weren't supposed to say out loud. Hearing it now, finally attached to a face I hadn't seen yet, made my stomach drop in a way I wasn't prepared for.