All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Wife Revenge Plot : Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

Four years.That's how long Eleanor Hale had been trying to give her husband a child.Four years of calendars marked in red ink. Four years of pregnancy tests lined up on the bathroom counter like little white tombstones. Four years of hope curdling into something heavier each time the second line refused to appear.She sat on the edge of the tub, staring at the test in her hand. Negative. Again.The tile was cold under her bare feet. She pressed her palm flat against her stomach, the way she always did in this exact moment, as if she could will something into being through sheer force of want."Elle?" Julian's voice came from the bedroom. "You okay in there?"She wiped her eyes before he could see, smoothing her face into something calm, something acceptable. "Fine. Be out in a minute."When she opened the door, he was standing there in his suit, tie half-knotted, looking at her the way he always did lately, searching, like he was scanning her for a verdict before she'd even spoken i

Eleanor stood in front of the bathroom mirror that morning, running a brush through her hair, watching the curve of her stomach in the reflection. Nine pounds of baby, the books said, give or take. A whole person, built inside her body over the course of a year that had broken her down and put her back together in equal measure."You ready for this?" she whispered to her reflection. "Last week. Last week was just us."The thought made her laugh and tear up at the same time. She thought about the nursery down the hall, painted soft yellow, the crib Julian had assembled with his own hands. She thought about how far they'd come from that morning four years ago when he'd left without a goodbye kiss.She didn't let herself think, even for a second, that the distance they'd traveled might have been an illusion the whole time.One week before her due date, Eleanor's friends insisted on one last night out before the baby came."Nothing crazy," Priya promised, looping an arm through hers as th

Eleanor pov The ceiling tiles blurred past above me, one after another, white squares smearing into a single pale streak as the gurney rolled.I couldn't feel my legs anymore. I could feel everything else. every wrong angle of my own body, every place the fall had broken something it shouldn't have. But my legs were just gone, far away, someone else's legs.I remember thinking, absurdly, that I should be more afraid than I was. I had spent my whole life afraid of small things, afraid of failing tests, afraid of disappointing my father, afraid of an empty pregnancy test turning up negative one more time. None of those fears had prepared me for this particular kind of calm, the strange stillness that settles over a body once it has decided, somewhere below conscious thought, that it doesn't have the strength left to panic."Stay with me, Eleanor." A man's voice. Dr. Bell's, I thought, though it kept sliding in and out of focus, like a radio station slowly losing its signal. "Stay with

I woke up on the bathroom floor.For a second I didn't move. Just lay there, cheek against cold tile, staring at the gap between the base of the sink and the floor where a thin line of dust had gathered along the edge. My breathing was shallow. My head throbbed low and steady.Then it all came back.The mirror. The hands that weren't mine. The flood of someone else's memories pouring through the one I already had.I sat up slowly, pressing my back against the wall, drawing my knees to my chest. A strange calm had settled over everything, the way it sometimes does after a storm has already broken, not peace, exactly, but the particular quiet of a person who has run out of room to panic and has to start thinking instead.Lilian Hayes.I said the name out loud, soft, testing the shape of it in a mouth that wasn't mine.She'd been a waitress. A girl who smelled like coffee and fryer oil at the end of a double shift, who counted tips at a corner table before walking home because cab fare w

The first thing I registered was his stillness.Not the stillness of someone being polite or patient. The stillness of a person who had never once needed to fill a silence in their life because silence had never made them uncomfortable. He sat with one arm resting along the back of the seat, watching me with dark eyes that gave nothing away, and waited.I took him in quickly, the way you scanned an unfamiliar room before you decided whether to stay in it.Tall, even seated. Dark hair, cut close at the sides, a little longer on top, pushed back from his face with the careless precision of someone who'd been told it looked good that way and had never bothered to disagree. A jaw that belonged on something carved rather than born. His suit was charcoal, no tie, the top button of his shirt undone in a way that probably meant he'd had a long day rather than that he was trying to look relaxed.He was looking at me the way people looked at problems they'd already solved.It irritated me immed