Married to My Ex's Father

Chapter6

Chapter 6: The Rules of Our Marriage

"You were listening."

I froze at the sound of his voice, my hand still pressed against the wall. Adrian stood at the end of the hallway, his expression unreadable, though nothing in it looked like anger.

"Yes," I said, because I refused to insult him with an excuse we'd both know was a lie. "I heard enough to have questions."

He studied me for a long moment, something almost like approval settling into his features. "Come into my study," he said, and turned without waiting to see if I'd follow.

The study smelled faintly of coffee and old paper, while a fire burned low in the hearth, throwing warm light across shelves that seemed to hold a lifetime of unread conversations. Adrian poured two cups from a pot on his desk, offering one to me without a word, and I shook my head. He set it aside without comment, as though my refusal told him something he'd wanted to know.

"What happened that night?" I asked, unwilling to waste the opening he'd given me.

Silence stretched between us long enough that I thought he might refuse to answer at all. "Not tonight," he finally said.

"You keep asking me to trust you," I said, my frustration slipping through despite my effort to stay calm. "I don't even know what I'm trusting."

Adrian set down his cup, and for the first time since I'd met him, he looked as though he was choosing his next words with real difficulty. "Ethan didn't leave because he stopped loving you," he said quietly.

I stared at him, waiting for more, but he only shook his head. The certainty in his voice frightened me more than the words themselves. "That's all I can tell you tonight."

Breakfast the next morning felt strange in its ordinariness, sunlight spilling across the table while Mrs. Brooks set down plates like this was any household on any unremarkable day. Victor joined us a few minutes later, dropping into his usual chair with the same watchfulness he carried everywhere.

"Sleep well?" he asked me, one eyebrow raised just slightly.

"About as well as you'd expect."

"Fair," he said, reaching for his coffee. "I've had worse weeks, and I once got shot in the leg."

I nearly choked on my tea, and even Adrian's mouth twitched at the corner before he schooled it back into composure. Victor, satisfied with the reaction, went quiet again, his attention already sliding back to the window.

Halfway through the meal, Victor slid a folder across the table toward Adrian without a word. Adrian opened it, read for a few seconds, and his thumb brushed the edge of his cufflink before he quietly closed it again and set it beside his plate.

"Everything all right?" I asked.

"Everything's handled," he said, and though his tone stayed even, I noticed he didn't touch his food again for the rest of the meal.

After breakfast, Mrs. Brooks offered to show me through the parts of the house I hadn't yet seen, and I accepted gratefully, glad for a reason to move rather than sit alone with my thoughts. She walked me through the library first, then the gardens, her commentary warm but efficient, clearly a woman who valued her words the way she valued everything else in this house.

We passed a long gallery of family portraits on the way back, generations of Ashfords' staring down from gilded frames, and my steps slowed on their own when I noticed a gap along the wall where a portrait should have hung. The outline of the frame remained pressed faintly into the wallpaper, though the painting itself was gone.

"Who used to hang there?" I asked.

Mrs. Brooks looked at the empty wall, and her smile faded for just a moment before she spoke. "The conservatory gets wonderful light this time of day," she said, and I understood, without needing to ask again, that the question would not be answered today.

I heard Victor's voice before I saw him, low and urgent, coming from the hallway near Adrian's study. "The press leak," he was saying. "I traced the call that tipped them off about Amelia's arrival. It came from her phone."

I slowed near the doorway, not quite eavesdropping, not quite able to walk past either. "Mrs. Brooks?" Adrian asked, his tone giving nothing away.

"The number's registered to her line," Victor said. "I don't know more than that yet."

"Then we ask her," Victor pressed. "Directly."

"No," Adrian said. "Evidence isn't truth. A phone number proves a phone was used. It doesn't prove who used it."

Victor looked ready to argue, but something in Adrian's tone closed the conversation before it could begin.

I found Mrs. Brooks in the kitchen a short while later, her hands steady around a mixing bowl, though something in her posture seemed different than before. Not guilty, I realized as I studied her face. Confused.

"Did you actually make that call?" I asked gently.

She looked up at me, and whatever she saw in my expression seemed to loosen something in her own. "No," she whispered. "I didn't."

I believed her, though I couldn't yet explain why, and something told me that instinct would matter more than proof before this was over.

The contract signing happened quietly that afternoon, no ceremony, no witnesses beyond Victor and Mrs. Brooks standing near the door. Adrian signed first, his handwriting precise and unhurried, then slid the pages toward me.

I hesitated, my pen hovering above the final line, and glanced up at him almost without meaning to. He didn't press me, didn't fill the silence with reassurance. He simply waited, giving me the one thing no one else had offered me all week, the right to take my time.

I signed beneath his name, and Victor initialed the corner as witness while Mrs. Brooks watched from across the room, her expression carefully neutral.

Adrian extended his hand once the papers were signed. "From today," he said, "we stop surviving separately." He paused. "Partners?"

I took his hand and shook it firmly. "Partners."

A courier arrived just before evening, delivering a small package addressed to Mrs. Amelia Ashford, a name I hadn't yet grown used to seeing written anywhere. I carried it upstairs alone, curiosity outweighing the exhaustion pressing at the edges of my day, and unwrapped it to find a phone inside, sleek and unfamiliar, already vibrating with an incoming call.

I answered without thinking, pressing it to my ear. Silence greeted me first, long and heavy, before a voice broke through that I recognized instantly despite months of memorizing every inflection of it.

Ethan.

"Get out of that house," he said, his voice low and urgent, edged with something that sounded almost like fear.

Before I could respond, before I could ask him where he was or why he'd vanished or what exactly he thought he was warning me against, the line went dead.

The call had lasted less than ten seconds, yet somehow it had undone every certainty I'd spent the day trying to build. I looked down at the contract resting on the table beside me, then back at the silent phone in my hand.

Had I just made the biggest mistake of my life?