All Chapters of Fake Heiress, Real Desire: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Julia — First-Person POVThree days after the proposal, Alan could sit upright without assistance.He made it sound like a minor administrative update — mentioned it the way he mentioned everything he considered beneath acknowledgment, with the flat brevity of someone who had decided the fact didn't warrant commentary. I sat beside his hospital bed and watched him push himself upright and kept my expression neutral and felt the terror of the last seventy-two hours move through me one final time before I let it go.He was sitting upright.He was alive.The ring was on my finger.Those were the facts I was operating from.Everything else — the apartment still being processed by investigators, Ava in custody, the press coverage that had detonated across every platform simultaneously the moment the police report became public — existed in a separate category. Real, requiring attention, carrying its own weight of consequence.But secondary.For exactly three days, it had been secondary.The

Julia — First-Person POVThe house had stopped feeling like a refuge.It still looked the same from the outside—warm light in the windows, soft curtains moving with the morning breeze, the quiet rhythm of a life that finally felt normal.But I had learned something important.Normal could lie.I stood by the nursery window, our son asleep behind me, his tiny breaths steady and innocent. My fingers rested lightly on the glass as I watched the gate outside.Nothing moved.And yet…I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was there.Watching.