All Chapters of CONTRACT WIFE, SECRET MOTHER : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

POV: EmilyThe dress cost more than my father's first car. I knew because the stylist told me, cheerfully, while tightening the corset at the back. I stood in front of the mirror and looked at a woman I didn't recognize. White lace, fitted waist, hair pinned up with small pearls threaded through it. Beautiful, in the way that things purchased with money tend to be.Outside the church doors, I could already hear them. Cameras. Voices. The low roar of a crowd that had gathered because Alexander Kane was getting married and that was apparently news worth standing in the cold for."Sixty seconds," someone said near the door.I picked up my bouquet. White roses. No one had asked what I liked.The doors opened. The noise hit me first. Camera shutters firing like rainfall, voices rising, a blur of faces pressed against barriers lining the path. I walked, because that was the only option. I kept my chin level and my shoulders back and I thought about my father, who was home this morning, safe

POV: EmilyThe nausea hit me first in the elevator. I had been standing there, coffee in hand, on my way down to meet Alexander's driver for a scheduled appearance at some charity luncheon. The elevator started moving and my stomach turned so violently I had to press my free hand flat against the wall.I made it through the luncheon by drinking water and rearranging food on my plate and smiling at the right moments. Nobody noticed. I had gotten very good at performing fine.That was three weeks after the night I had decided not to think about.+++++++By the second week of feeling wrong, I started paying attention. Not to the nausea alone. To the tiredness that sat behind my eyes no matter how much I slept. To the way certain smells hit me like something physical. Clara had made fish one evening and I had walked out of the kitchen so fast she called after me asking if I was alright."Just a headache," I said.I said that a lot now.At night I lay in bed and counted backwards and then

POV: EmilyThe lobby was empty when I walked through it. Marble floors, soft lighting, the quiet hum of a building that never fully slept. The security guard at the front desk looked up as I passed. I kept my eyes forward and my bag close to my side and pushed through the revolving door before he could say anything.The night hit me like cold water. I stood on the pavement outside the Kane building and breathed it in. Traffic moved distantly somewhere behind me. A taxi crawled past, slowed, kept going. Above me, thirty-two floors of glass and steel climbed into a sky that was dark and cloudless and indifferent to everything happening at its base.I started walking, I did not look back at the building. I made that a deliberate choice and I kept making it for three blocks until my legs found a rhythm and my mind stopped doing the thing where it replayed the phone call over and over. *Manageable. Necessary inconvenience. Replaceable.* I pressed my free hand flat against my stomach and wa

POV: MarcusI had been sitting at my kitchen table for twenty minutes before I made the call. That was not like me, I was not a man who sat with things. I was a man who handled things, who moved information from one place to another with clean efficiency and no emotional residue. That was why Alexander paid me. That was why he trusted me above everyone else in his circle.I picked up the phone and called him back. He answered before the first ring finished. "Tell me."I pressed two fingers against the bridge of my nose. "She turned her phone off. I haven't been able to get a location." I paused. "But Alexander. There's something else. I need to tell you something about that night. Something I should have told you before."The silence on his end was the particular kind he used when he was paying complete attention. I had learned to read his silences the way other people read faces."What?" he said."Standard protocol," I said. "I run movement monitoring on anyone connected to you in a

POV: EmilySix weeks was long enough to build a routine and short enough that the routine still felt borrowed. I woke up every morning in Dominic's spare room at seven, before his alarm went off down the hall. I made tea in his kitchen while he slept, sitting at the table with my laptop open, picking up whatever editorial work had come in overnight. Proofreading mostly. Some copy editing for a small publishing house that didn't know or care who I was married to. The work was quiet and precise and it asked nothing of me except attention, which suited me perfectly.Dominic never asked questions. He moved around me with the careful ease of someone who understood that a person rebuilding themselves needed space more than they needed noise. He made terrible jokes at breakfast. He left snacks outside my door when he got home late. He did not mention Alexander's name once in six weeks, which was either discipline or kindness. With Dominic, it was usually both.I had not told him about the te