Chapter 1: The Woman He Brought Home

I wore the green dress tonight. The one Adrian loved before he forgot to love things.He picked it out himself, our third date, laughing when I said it was too much. "Wear it for me anyway," he'd said, and I had, and he looked at me all night like I was the only lit thing in the room.He used to leave notes in my coat pockets back then. Little things. "Missing you already." I found one on a Tuesday once and grinned like a fool on a crowded train.That was the man I cooked for tonight. Not the one who came home late and quiet. The old one. I still believed he was in there somewhere, under all the silence, waiting for me to reach him.I lit the candles twice, because the first set burned down while I waited.I checked my phone. Nothing. I turned it face down so I would stop.There was a time he called if he was ten minutes late. There was a time he called just to hear me pick up. I put that thought where I keep the others, folded small.Then the key turned in the lock, and everything in

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Chapter 2: His Pregnant Cousin

Just a little longer. Then everything we planned is ours.I lay there and let the words settle into me like silt, and I did not sleep again.I told myself I had misheard. People say things half asleep. Plans could mean anything, the nursery, the doctor, the family. I built a dozen soft explanations and laid them over the sentence like blankets, and not one of them covered it.Adrian came back to bed near four. He did not touch me. He turned to the wall and was asleep in minutes, and I lay beside him listening to him breathe like a man with nothing on his mind.By morning I had a face ready. Calm. Easy. The one that keeps the peace.I made his coffee the way he likes it and set it by his hand and waited until he had taken the first sip, because you do not ask a hungry man for anything."Can I ask you something," I said. "About last night.""Mm.""When you came in. You seemed, I don't know. Worried about her."He turned a page of whatever was on his phone. "She's seven months pregnant,

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Chapter 3: The Things He Keeps Locked

The bracelet stayed in my head for three days. I did not sleep on it so much as circle it.Then a morning came when the shower ran and Adrian was humming behind the glass, and before I could talk myself out of it, I crossed to his side of the room and opened the drawer.I told myself I only wanted to be wrong. I wanted, so badly, to find nothing and feel foolish and go make breakfast like a normal wife.The receipt for the bracelet was where I remembered. Twenty-two hundred dollars. Eight months old.It was not alone.Under it, a second slip. A necklace. Four thousand dollars.Under that, a boutique receipt for a coat. Wine colored.I had watched that coat walk through my front door three nights ago, with a pregnant woman inside it.My hands started to shake. There were more slips beneath, a whole small stack of them, and I could not make myself count. The room tilted. I gripped the edge of the drawer.The water shut off."What are you doing."I turned. He stood in the bathroom doorwa

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Chapter 4: The Room Beside Ours

The word did not leave when they did. Our. It moved into the house and made itself at home, the way she had.I stopped arguing after that night. Not because I had given up, but because I had finally understood the game, and you do not win a game by flipping the board while the other players are still smiling.So I went quiet. And I began to watch.I bought a cheap notebook, the kind you keep for grocery lists, and I hid it inside the lining of a winter coat no one would ever touch. In it I wrote things down. Dates. Times. What was said, word for word.Not because I was losing my mind. Because I could feel them building the version of me that had, and I wanted a record from before, in my own steady hand, so that one day I could prove I had been here, and awake, and paying attention.The house gave up a little more of itself each week.My reading chair went first, out of the good light and into a spare room, because Isabella found it easier on her back. Then my candles vanished into a d

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Chapter 5: The Family Has Chosen Her

That's not the name we were given.I did not correct him again. I said thank you, as if he had done me a favor, and I went back down the stairs, because there was no time to fall apart.The family was coming that night.Thursday. The dinner Adrian had made me promise not to ruin. I had spent the afternoon on it before I ever heard the men upstairs, the good china, the roast, the flowers, and now I moved through the rooms straightening things that were already straight, because if I kept my hands busy I would not have to feel my hands shaking.They arrived all at once, the way the Blackwoods did everything.Richard first, slow and watchful, missing nothing. Then Victoria in gray silk, her mouth already set. Behind her Charles, all teeth and no warmth, and Margaret, who had never once said my name without making it sound like a mistake."Isabella." Victoria crossed the room to her first. To her, not to me. She took Isabella's face in both hands like something she had grown herself. "Loo

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Lahat ng Kabanata ng GUESS WHO’s BACK, MR CEO: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 5

Chapter 1: The Woman He Brought Home

Chapter 2: His Pregnant Cousin

Chapter 3: The Things He Keeps Locked

Chapter 4: The Room Beside Ours

Chapter 5: The Family Has Chosen Her