Pregnant By The Billionaire Who Forgot Me

CHAPTER FIVE

Nora's Pov

Camille Rousseau arrived on a Friday morning like she had been invited for a weekend and intended to stay forever.

I heard her before I saw her. That kind of laugh that fills a room without trying, low and easy and completely at home in spaces that cost a lot of money. I was coming down the main staircase when she walked through the front door and the entrance hall shifted around her the way rooms shift around people who expect them to.

She was exactly what I expected and worse.

Tall, effortlessly put together, the kind of woman who made expensive things look casual. She handed her coat to the housekeeper without looking at her and turned to Diana with both hands extended and a warmth that looked completely genuine. Diana took her hands and smiled in a way I had never once seen her smile at me.

Then Camille looked up and saw me on the stairs.

She didn't look surprised. She had known I was here. Diana would have briefed her thoroughly before she walked through that door. But she looked at me with something that was almost curiosity, the way you look at a problem you've already solved but want to examine up close anyway.

"You must be Nora," she said.

Her accent made my name sound like something fragile.

"Yes," I said. I came down the last few steps and stood at the bottom of the staircase because stopping halfway felt worse.

"Camille Rousseau," she said, like I didn't already know. She didn't extend her hand. She just looked at me with that open, pleasant expression and said, "Ethan has told me about the situation. I hope this isn't too uncomfortable for you."

Everything about it was designed to make me feel small without saying anything I could object to directly. The phrasing. The tone. The gentle emphasis on the word situation like my pregnancy was a mild administrative issue.

I said, "I'm fine."

She smiled and turned back to Diana and that was it. I had been acknowledged and filed away.

I went back upstairs.

I sat in my room and talked myself down from the particular kind of anger that comes from being handled expertly by someone who knows exactly what they're doing. Camille hadn't been rude. She hadn't threatened me. She had simply walked into the house and made it clear without a single aggressive word that she belonged here and I didn't.

And the worst part was that Ethan had told her about the situation. Which meant they had spoken about me. Which meant she already had his ear in a way I didn't.

I needed to think clearly so I called Grace.

Grace said three things. She said Camille was a distraction and I needed to stay focused. She said Diana had clearly planned this and I couldn't react emotionally. And then she said if I let some French woman walk into that house and push me out after everything I had already survived she would never forgive me.

It helped. Slightly.

The DNA test was scheduled for the following week. Marcus had arranged it through a private clinic. Until the results came back I had very little ground to stand on beyond the marriage certificate and I knew it. So I kept to my room, came down for meals, said little, and watched.

Watching taught me a lot.

Camille was strategic in a way that looked effortless. She never pushed. She never performed. She simply made herself present in Ethan's daily life in all the small ways that mattered. She was there when he came down for breakfast. She suggested walks that became a natural part of his recovery routine. She referenced shared memories carefully and just frequently enough to keep them alive without overdoing it. She was rebuilding something in him slowly and deliberately and she was very good at it.

Ethan was not unkind to her. He was also not the version of himself I remembered. The man I had lived with for months had been contained, self-sufficient, someone who kept the world at a certain distance including me. This version was more open to being guided, more willing to lean on the people around him because the gap in his memory had left him with less certainty about his own instincts.

That openness was exactly what Camille was exploiting.

Four days after her arrival I came down late one evening for water and found them in the sitting room. They weren't doing anything significant. He was reading and she was on the sofa nearby with her legs tucked under her going through her phone. But it was the ease of it. The way two people occupy a room when they've stopped being careful around each other.

He looked up when I came in. "Nora."

"Sorry," I said. "I just needed water."

"You don't need to apologize," he said.

Camille looked up from her phone and smiled at me pleasantly and said nothing at all.

I got my water and left.

Back in my room I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling and did the mental accounting I had been doing every night since I came back. What I had. What I didn't. What I needed.

What I had was a legal marriage, a confirmed pregnancy, and the truth.

What I didn't have was his memory, his trust, or a single ally inside this house.

What I needed was the DNA results and time.

I put my hand on my stomach. Ten weeks now. I hadn't seen a doctor since coming back to the mansion because I didn't want Diana to know the details of my appointments before I did. I had a private appointment booked for Monday under my name only.

I was almost asleep when I heard footsteps in the corridor outside my room. They stopped outside my door. I lay still and waited.

A long pause. Then they moved away.

I sat up in the dark and looked at the door.

I didn't know if it was him. I told myself it probably wasn't. It could have been anyone. The housekeeper. Staff doing a late check.

But the footsteps had the particular weight and pace I had spent months memorizing without meaning to.

My phone lit up on the nightstand. A message from an unknown number.

I picked it up.

“We need to talk, not in the house. Meet me tomorrow morning at the coffee shop on Briar Street. Come alone and don't tell anyone.”

“— Marcus”