The Forgotten Billionaire's Wife

Chapter Two

ALEXANDER

I cancelled on Isabelle at seven forty-three in the evening.

I sent a text, which was cowardly and I knew it was cowardly and I did it anyway, because the alternative was calling her and I was not ready for her voice yet. Not until I had sat with the folder from my father's desk long enough to arrange my face into something that wouldn't give everything away the moment she asked what was wrong.

Something came up. Rain check on dinner. I'll explain tomorrow.

Her reply came back in under a minute.

Fine. You're going to make it up to me though.

That should have been a relief. It wasn't. Isabelle's lack of pushback had always unsettled me more than her arguments did, because her arguments I could follow — I knew where they were going, I knew how they ended. Her silences went places I couldn't map.

I sat in my apartment that night with a glass of whiskey I didn't finish and the ring box open on the coffee table in front of me. I kept looking at it.

I was not a man who wasted time feeling sorry for himself. I considered that one of my better qualities. But there is a specific, quiet kind of grief that comes not from losing something you had, but from losing something you were about to have — something you had already, in your mind, arranged your future around — and I sat with that for longer than I would ever admit to anyone.

By ten o'clock I had made my peace with it. Or something that felt enough like peace to function.

By ten-fifteen I had convinced myself that it would be fine. That the marriage was, as my father intended it, a business arrangement with paperwork attached. That my life with Isabelle did not have to end, it simply had to become less official. Less visible. People managed these things. People managed far more complicated things than this every day.

I believed that. I want to be clear about that, I genuinely believed it, that night, sitting in my apartment with the unfinished whiskey and the open ring box.

I was not lying to myself, exactly.

I was just not yet acquainted with how wrong I was.

~

I went to Isabelle's the following morning.

She opened the door in a silk robe that cost more than most people's rent and looked at me.

"Coffee?" she said.

"Please," I said.

She moved to the kitchen. I followed. I sat on one of her counter stools — she had expensive ones, the kind with the curved backs and the brushed brass feet — and watched her pour two cups.

"Talk," she said, sliding mine across the counter. “I know something is bothering you.”

I talked.

I told her about the arrangement. About the Flores family, the bakery, the debt. I told her my parents had made their position clear and that I had decided, practically, to comply. I kept my voice even. I used words like arrangement and formality and temporary and structure, and I watched her face while I said them.

She didn't react the way I expected. There was no flash of anger. No tears, which I had half prepared for. She wrapped both hands around her coffee cup and listened, and when I finished she was quiet for a moment.

"A baker," she said.

"Yes."

"Your parents want you to marry a baker."

"Her family and my mother go back a long way," I said. "It's not about… it's an arrangement. It's paperwork. It doesn't change anything between us, Isabelle. You know that."

She looked at me over the rim of her cup.

"Of course," she said.

"I mean it," I said. "I bought the ring. That hasn't changed. None of this changes what I want."

"Alexander." She set her cup down and reached across the counter and put her hand over mine, and her expression was so gentle and so understanding that something in my chest loosened. "I know."

I exhaled.

"You'll figure it out," she said. "You always do." And then she smiled; that particular smile of hers, the slow, private one that had always made me feel like I was the only person in whatever room we were in.

I did not recognise, then, what that smile actually was.

I understand it now. Now, I could describe it precisely: it was the smile of a woman who had just received a piece of information she hadn't had before and was already, quietly and without any visible urgency, figuring out what to do with it.

But that morning, I just smiled back.

I drank my coffee. I left her apartment feeling better than I had the night before. I told myself everything was going to be manageable.

I was a fool. But I was a very confident one.

AMELIA

The Hayderes sent a car for me on Friday.

I was standing outside my building at the agreed time in my good coat — the navy one, the one with the bone buttons — with my bag on my shoulder and my keys in my hand, ready to order a cab, when a black car pulled up and a driver climbed out and said my name.

"Miss Flores? Mr. Haydere sent me."

I stood there for a second.

"Which Mr. Haydere?" I asked, because it seemed like a reasonable question under the circumstances.

"The younger Mr. Haydere, miss," the driver said, without any change in expression.

I was not sure how I felt about that. I got in the car anyway.

The Haydere estate was not what I had pictured, which was foolish because I had seen enough of their world by now to have pictured it accurately. It was large and old and had the kind of quiet that only exists when there is enough space and money to keep the outside world from intruding. The driveway alone took long enough to navigate that I had time to think about turning back, which I considered seriously for approximately fifteen seconds before deciding that was not an option.

Alexander was waiting in a sitting room that I was shown into by a woman who introduced herself as the housekeeper. He stood when I came in, which I hadn't expected, and for a moment we just looked at each other across the room.

"You came," he said.

"You sent a car," I said. "I assumed it was important.”

"Sit down," he said.

I sat. He sat across from me. He had a folder on the table between us, which seemed to be a Haydere family tradition, folders on tables, information delivered without softening.

"The wedding date," he said. "My mother wants November. I wanted to … I thought you should be consulted."

I looked at him for a moment. The fact that he had thought I should be consulted surprised me.

"November is fine," I said.

"You don't want more time?"

"Would more time change anything?"

He held my gaze for a beat. "No," he said.

"Then November is fine," I said again.

He nodded. He reached for the folder.

"There's a pre-nuptial agreement," he said. "My lawyers have drawn it up. You should have your own lawyer review it before you sign. I'll have a firm recommended to you if you don't already have someone."

"I have someone," I said. I didn't, actually. But I wasn't going to tell him that.

He looked at me properly then. The same way he had in my parents' living room, after the cake. Like he was seeing something he hadn't expected to find and wasn't entirely sure what to do with it.

"Alright," he said.

I looked down at the pre-nuptial agreement without picking it up. My name was already on the cover page, printed cleanly above his. Amelia Grace Flores and Alexander James Haydere. Seeing it laid out like that, formal and typed and real, made something shift in my chest.

I was brave. I knew I was brave. I had said yes to this and I meant it and I was not going to fall apart over a piece of paper.

But then Alexander's phone buzzed on the table between us, face up, and I saw the name on the screen before he reached for it.

Isabelle.

He picked it up quickly. Too quickly. He turned it over, face down, and looked at me with an expression that was blank and composed and told me absolutely everything.

"Sorry," he said. "Where were we?"

"The agreement," I said.

"Right," he said.

I looked back down at the paper.

His phone buzzed again. He didn't move for it this time, but his jaw tightened — just slightly, just barely enough to catch — and I understood, with a clarity that settled into me like cold water, exactly what I was walking into.

I picked up the pre-nuptial agreement. I squared the pages against the table.

"I'll have my lawyer look at it by Monday," I said, with a steadiness I did not feel.

"Good," he said.

Good.

I folded the agreement into my bag and I smiled at him because I was my mother's daughter.

But in the car on the way home, I took out my phone and searched for a family lawyer, and while I was searching, a thought arrived that I couldn't push away.

He's still in love with her.

And then, quieter, underneath it:

She's not going to let him go.

I just didn't know, then, how far she would go to make sure of it.