All Chapters of He Chose Her While I Was Dying, Then I Became an Heiress: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

SiennaThe paper crinkled under my hands before I even sat down, and I hated that. Hated that my body was already bracing before Dr. Whitfield said a word.He didn't make me wait long."Mrs. Hart, the test results confirm what we suspected. Your heart is failing faster than we hoped. Without surgery, and soon, I'd estimate you have six months."I have half a year left to live.The words didn't feel real. They felt like something that belonged to another woman, in another office, in another life. I sat very still while he kept talking, about medications and specialists and a surgery that cost more than Julian's mother would ever let him spend on me, and I nodded in all the right places because that was what eight years of marriage had trained me to do. Nod. Smile. Absorb.I didn't cry until I was in the car.Eight years. One daughter. And somewhere along the way, I had stopped being a person and started being a problem someone else was managing.It hadn't always been like this. I still

SiennaI didn't stop driving until the streets stopped looking familiar, my coat still buttoned wrong from how fast I'd grabbed it off the hook, my eyes still stinging from the cold outside that front door. I didn't remember choosing a direction.My hands had simply turned the wheel the way they always did lately, steering me somewhere that wasn't home before the rest of me caught up with the decision. Somehow I still ended up outside Elias's studio, the way water finds the lowest point without meaning to.The lights were still on upstairs, warm and yellow against the dark street, the only window on the whole block that looked like anyone inside actually wanted to be there. I sat in the car for a long time before I made myself go in, watching my own breath fog the windshield, trying to remember what my face was supposed to look like when it wasn't falling apart.The bell over the door announced me before I could change my mind. Elias looked up from his bench, reading glasses pushed in

SiennaI stood in the study for a long time after the door shut behind them, listening to Mia's voice fade down the hallway, bright and easy, already telling Camille about some dream she'd had, already a whole daughter I didn't get to know anymore.Something in me went very quiet then. Not sad, exactly. Finished.I went upstairs and pulled the suitcase down from the closet before I'd even decided to use it, and once I started packing I couldn't seem to stop, hands moving faster than my thoughts, folding things I didn't remember choosing. It should have taken longer. Eight years should have accumulated more than one suitcase, but when I stood there looking at what was actually mine, there wasn't much. A few dresses Eleanor had never approved of. My sketchbooks, full of designs I'd stopped believing anyone would ever let me make. A small wooden bird one of the older boys at the orphanage had carved for me the year I turned ten, the only thing that had followed me through every foster p

SiennaThe first thing I understood, before I came to, was that I was not supposed to still be breathing. There was a weight in my chest that felt like it belonged to someone larger than me, and every breath came slowly and deliberately, like my body had forgotten how to do it without being told.There was a machine somewhere near my head keeping steady, patient time, and my whole body felt like it belonged to someone else, borrowed and badly fitted. I tried to move my hand and something tugged at the back of it, a line taped down, and the effort alone left me exhausted enough to want to slide back under."She's awake." A woman's voice, brisk, professional. "Get the doctor."I forced my eyes open against a light that felt too bright and too white, and the first face I found wasn't a nurse's at all.It was mine.Not exactly. But close enough that for one long, disoriented moment I thought I was looking at a mirror someone had propped up beside the bed, a man's face built from the same