All Chapters of Secrets of a Hidden Marriage: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

215 Chapters

Chapter 175: Don't Go — and He Didn't Let Me

I start to stand.His hand shoots out and catches mine.He doesn't look up. Doesn't lift his head from his knees. Doesn't say a word. He just — grabs my hand with both of his and holds on, the way a person holds on when they're out at sea and have found the only thing left that's solid.I stop moving.I sit back down."I'm not going anywhere," I say softly. "I'm right here."The auditorium breathes around us — dim and gray, the ghost light throwing its pale circle over the empty stage — and Adam Hart, who has kept every wall up and every door locked since the day I met him, sits curled on the floor of Aldridge Auditorium holding my hand like it's the only thing keeping him inside his own body.So I stay.I don't talk. Don't fill the silence with reassurances that would ring false, don't perform comfort at him the way people do when they're scared of the quiet. I just stay — shoulder close to his, hand in

Chapter 176: He Cooked. Adam Said No. And Something Shifted Anyway.

The smell hits me before I even reach the kitchen.Rich, slow-cooked broth, the kind that takes hours and patience and a person who actually knows what they're doing — which, it turns out, Liam Hart does. He's standing at the stove in a white henley with his sleeves pushed up, and I stop in the kitchen doorway and just watch him for a second, because there is something deeply disorienting about the most controlled man I've ever met reducing a wild chicken to something that smells like the best thing I've ever stood near."You made broth," I say."You said you were starving." He doesn't look up from the pot. "Noodles are almost ready."My stomach makes a sound that is not dignified.He glances back. The corner of his mouth moves."Go get Adam," he says. "Tell him there's enough."I hesitate — remember the closed door, the one syllable, the click of the latch — and then I go anyway, because Liam made three portions and

Chapter 177: He Came Back Early — and Saw Everything

---By day eight of the exposure sessions, Adam doesn't flinch.The cameras fire — six of them, from three angles — and he stands center stage with his shoulders level and his jaw set and his eyes open, and he keeps running his lines without losing a single word. The flash hits his face like a slap and he absorbs it the way a person absorbs cold water: fully, without pleasure, but without breaking.The team watches him the way people watch something they don't entirely believe is real.I watch him and feel something sharp and warm and complicated move through my chest that I have gotten very good at pushing back down."Good," I say. Even. Professional. "Again."He runs it again.And again.The cameras don't stop him anymore.Three days before the Showcase, the rehearsals follow us home.It starts practically — the blocking has specifics we keep second-guessing, dialogue rhythms that only work at full run-through spee

Chapter 178: He Kissed Her Cheek — and Liam Saw Every Second of It

Liam stops walking.He's at the top of the stairs, heading toward the balcony, the house quiet around him — and he stops because the two figures he can see through the glass panels of the sunroom door are not what he expected, and the thing tightening in his chest right now is not something he has a clean name for.Allie is asleep.She's folded over the small marble table on the balcony, head resting on her crossed arms, script still splayed open beneath her cheek, completely, utterly unconscious in the way she sleeps when she's genuinely exhausted — deep and boneless and unguarded, her dark hair spilling across the table, her breathing slow.Adam is beside her.He hasn't moved. He's sitting with his own script in his hands, but he's not reading it. He's looking at her — and Liam has known this boy for twenty-one years, has watched him be cold and precise and deliberately removed from everything that might require him to feel some

Chapter 179: Rise to Fame or Crash and Burn — She's About to Find Out

She hangs up first.She doesn't want to — she wants to stay on the line until he says something that sounds like him, until the voice on the other end matches the man who came home early and pressed his lips to her hair and told her to sleep — but she can hear the distance in his silence, vast and deliberate, and holding on to it only makes the ache worse."Goodnight," she says.He's already gone.Allie sets her phone on the nightstand and lies back against the pillow and stares at the ceiling in the specific dark of a room where everything is wrong in a way she can't prove.He was in a meeting. She says it to herself like a rope she's trying to hold onto. People have meetings. People are short on the phone when they're working. It doesn't mean anything.But her chest knows the difference between busy and ice.And what she heard tonight was ice.She lies awake for a long

Chapter 180: He Threw Himself Over Her — and the Truss Came Down Anyway

The performance is the best thing she's ever done.She knows it the way performers know — not from applause, not from the judges' faces, but from the specific quality of a room that has stopped thinking and started feeling. The auditorium is held breath and full hearts, and Allie is Juliet, and Adam is Romeo, and somewhere out there in those thousand dark seats there may or may not be a man with cold eyes and a phone call she cannot stop hearing.She doesn't look for him.She performs.The final act is the death scene.The stage transforms — low light, mournful strings, the particular chill of a love story that was never going to survive its own beauty. Allie stands at the edge of the elevated platform — one meter of height, softened by the cushion below hidden beneath a scatter of prop flowers — and she speaks the last lines of Juliet in a voice that doesn't feel borrowed anymore:"I seek not to l

Chapter 181: She Made Him Soup Every Night — He Never Touched It

Dr. Yao pulls down his mask."Ninth rib fracture. Not critical — but we're keeping him for observation to rule out complications. Pneumothorax, hemothorax." He looks at them both over the rims of his glasses. "Young, strong baseline. He'll recover. But he needs rest and he needs to stay."Liam exhales.It's not a sound — barely even a movement. Just a fractional release of something he's been holding since the moment that truss hit, and Allie watches it happen beside her and feels the relief move through her own body like something unlocking.Then the tears come.She doesn't mean them to. She is not, generally, a person who cries in hospital corridors over men who have made it very clear they don't particularly like her. But the image keeps replaying without her permission — the shadow falling, the fraction of a second where she understood what was coming and couldn't move — and Adam, Adam, running from the wing with no calculation, no hes

Chapter 182: Don't Bring Me Soup. I Want to Be Alone.

The coconut chicken broth is perfect.She knows it is. She's made it three times now — adjusting the ratio of coconut water to stock, tweaking the timing on the herbs, getting the chicken to the exact texture that means it'll melt into porridge without going chalky. The house chef confirmed it this evening with a raised eyebrow and a nod that meant more coming from him than a full sentence would from anyone else.It's the best thing she's learned to make in twenty years of not knowing how to cook.She fills a bowl and puts it in the insulated carrier and walks down the hall toward the light under Liam's study door — the same light that's been on every night this week, burning past midnight, burning until she finally falls asleep and it doesn't matter anymore.She knocks.A pause. Then: "Come in."She pushes the door open.He's not at his desk.He's on the narrow balcony off the study — standing with his back t

Chapter 183: Cuter Than Oscar — and He Blushed

"You people," Allie says, setting the thermal bag on the bedside table with slightly more force than strictly necessary, "have a serious problem appreciating when someone is being kind to you."She's thinking about Liam when she says it.She's looking at Adam, but she's thinking about the soup on the desk that was still there this morning, stone cold, untouched, exactly where she'd placed it last night. About I want to be alone delivered with that particular flat finality that cut more than any sharp word would have.Adam watches her unpack the containers with the quiet attention of someone who notices things but has learned not to comment on most of them."Did you and my uncle fight?" he asks.She keeps her hands busy. "No.""You seem upset.""I'm fine.""You set the spoon down like it owed you money."She stops. Looks at him. He is absolutely, infuriat

Chapter 184: She Waited at the Airport — He Told Her to Be Proper

Liam doesn't go in.He stands in the doorway long enough to see everything — Allie leaning forward with the spoon, Adam's ears flushed, the ease between them that has grown in this hospital room over the past week like something no one planted but can't stop — and then he turns and walks back down the corridor.He doesn't make a sound.Allie goes straight from the hospital to campus.She's barely through the gate when she catches the current running through the student body — that particular electric murmur that means something has happened and word hasn't finished spreading yet.Two girls near the journalism building. She slows."—did you hear? Felicity Montgomery got expelled.""That can't be right. Her dad is basically city government. The principal has been protecting her for years.""I'm telling you it happened. She's gone. Whatever she did — whoever she crossed &m

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