The Forgotten Billionaire's Wife

Chapter Four

AMELIA

The Haydere estate at night was a different thing entirely from the Haydere estate in daylight.

In daylight it was impressive. Grand and cold and impressive. At night, with most of the lights off and the staff gone home and just the two of us moving through it like strangers in a museum after closing time, it was something else. It was enormous. Every footstep echoed slightly.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Doyle, had left a bottle of champagne in the master bedroom with two glasses and a small handwritten card that said Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Haydere. I read the card twice. The second time felt stranger than the first.

Mrs. Haydere.

I set the card down on the dresser.

Alexander came in behind me and loosened his tie without looking at me.

The room was beautiful. Large and warm-toned and expensively furnished, with a bed that was big enough that two people could sleep in it without their occupying the same continent. I noted this with some private relief.

"Do you want champagne?" I asked, because someone had to say something and it appeared it was going to be me.

He glanced at the bottle. "If you want some."

"I asked if you wanted some."

"I don't mind either way, Amelia."

I picked up the bottle and poured one glass for myself because I had decided, somewhere between the car and the front door, that I was not going to spend this night being smaller than I needed to be. I poured a second glass and set it on his side of the dresser and didn't offer it to him. It was there if he wanted it.

He picked it up, which I counted as a small victory for something.

We stood on opposite sides of the bedroom like two people waiting to be told what to do next. The silence was not comfortable, but it was not hostile either.

"I'll use the bathroom first," I said. "If that's alright."

"It's your bathroom too," he said.

I took my overnight bag and went in.

~

I sat on the edge of the bathtub for longer than I needed to.

I wasn't crying. I want to be clear about that — I was not crying, and I was not going to cry, because I had made my decision and I was standing by it and tears on my wedding night would have felt like a betrayal of my own resolve. But I sat there with the bathroom tiles cold through my dress and my bouquet sitting in the sink because I hadn't known where else to put it, and I had a very direct, very private conversation with myself.

You knew what this was, I told myself. You agreed to it. You walked down that aisle with your chin level and you said vows you meant and none of that changes because he doesn't love you. You knew he didn't love you. That was always part of the arrangement.

I believed that.

I also sat on the edge of that bathtub for eleven minutes.

Then I changed into something comfortable, washed my face, took my hair down properly, and went back out.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbows, looking at his phone. He put it down when I came out, which I appreciated more than I wanted to admit.

He looked at me.

"We don't have to—" he started.

"I know," I said.

A pause.

"I mean—"

"Alexander." I kept my voice even. "I understand the situation. You don't have to explain it to me."

Something shifted in his expression. Relief, I thought. Immediately followed by something that looked almost like shame, though it was gone before I could be certain.

"Alright," he said.

ALEXANDER

I am not going to dress it up.

It was a transaction. That was what we had both signed up for, and that was what it was, and I had made my peace with that before we ever walked into that chapel. Emotions were not required. Emotions were, in fact, specifically what I had decided to leave outside this particular room.

I was good at that. Compartmentalising. It was one of the skills my father had, deliberately or not, built into me over thirty-six years of watching him separate business from sentiment with the clean precision of a man who had never confused the two.

So.

She came out of the bathroom in something simple — grey, comfortable— and she looked at me with that steady, clear-eyed way she had and said she understood the situation. And I believed her. That was the thing about Amelia that kept catching me off guard, she was entirely without pretense. Whatever she was feeling, she managed it herself, privately. She did not require me to manage it for her.

I didn't know, then, whether to find that easier or more unsettling.

We were quiet for a while. She sat on her side of the bed and I sat on mine and the champagne was finished and the room was warm, and it was, objectively, a functional situation.

But functional was its own kind of difficult.

I kept thinking — not about Isabelle, which surprised me — but about what Amelia's father had said. She's a good woman. And about the way she had said her vows like she meant them. And about the eleven minutes she had spent in the bathroom that she thought I hadn't counted.

"Can I ask you something?" she said, into the quiet.

"Go ahead," I said.

"The bakery renovation." She was looking at the ceiling, not at me. "The contractor your family arranged, I'd like to be the one approving the decisions. The layout, the equipment, the aesthetic. All of it."

I looked at her profile. "That's what you want to talk about right now."

"I want to establish it now," she said. "Before it becomes a thing later. Flour Power is mine. Whatever else this is—" a small pause, just barely there "—that stays mine. I don't want input I didn't ask for."

I thought about that for a moment.

"Fine," I said.

"Fine as in you agree, or fine as in—"

"Fine as in I agree," I said. "It's your bakery. I'm not interested in sourdough decisions."

She made a sound that was almost — almost — a laugh. Not quite.

"Alright," she said.

"Alright," I said.

The lamp on her side went off.

I lay in the dark next to my wife, who I did not know, who I had not chosen, who had just negotiated the terms of her professional autonomy on her wedding night with more composure than most people brought to board meetings, and I stared at the ceiling and thought about the specific, suffocating situation I was now inside.

And then I thought about Isabelle's message.

How does it feel, husband?

I had not answered her properly. I had said fine because there was no other available answer. But the honest answer, if I were the kind of man who gave honest answers to questions like that, was something more complicated.

I reached for my phone on the nightstand. Force of habit.

There were two more messages from Isabelle since the one in the car. I opened the first one.

Then I stopped.

Locked the phone. Put it face down.

Amelia's breathing beside me had evened out. She was asleep, or was doing an excellent impression of it. Either way, she had let the day go faster and more completely than I had managed.

I closed my eyes.

I thought about the ring in my jacket pocket.

Still in the box. Still waiting.

I thought about what my father had said: don't make the mistake of not seeing her. And I thought about how I had been, for the entirety of this day, making exactly that mistake with a consistency that should have embarrassed me more than it did.

I was still thinking about it when I finally, somewhere past two in the morning, fell asleep.

~

I woke at six to my phone ringing.

Isabelle's name on the screen. I silenced it quickly, glanced at Amelia's side of the bed — still asleep, facing away from me — and took the phone to the bathroom.

"It's six in the morning," I said, keeping my voice low.

"I know what time it is." Her voice was bright and unbothered in the way it always was, that particular tone that meant she had been awake for a while. "I just wanted to hear your voice. Is that not allowed anymore, husband?"

"Don't call me that," I said.

"Why not?" she said. "That's what you are, isn't it? To her."

"Isabelle—"

"I'm not angry, Alexander." A pause. "I just wanted to remind you of something."

"What?" I said.

"The dinner tonight," she said. "You're still coming."

I had not agreed to any dinner. I was certain I had not agreed to any dinner.

"What dinner?" I said.

"I've already made the reservation," she said, and her voice had that soft, certain quality that meant the decision had been made before she called me. "Eight o'clock. Our place. Dress nicely."

The line went quiet.

I stood in the bathroom of my marital home on the morning after my wedding, phone in hand, and said nothing, because the thing I should have said was a word that had, apparently, stopped being available to me the moment Isabelle asked for something.

When I came back out, Amelia was awake.

She was sitting up, looking at the window, hands in her lap. She did not look at me when I came back into the room. She looked at the window.

"Everything okay?" she asked. Casually.

"Yes," I said. "Go back to sleep."

She nodded once.

She did not go back to sleep.

And something about the way she sat there — straight-backed, quiet, already dressed in whatever she'd put on while I was in the bathroom — told me that she had heard every word.