The Billionaire’s Missing Bride

Chapter4

The city they landed in was loud in a way Namara — Nora, she reminded herself, over and over, in those first disorienting weeks — had never experienced. Not the curated, hushed loudness of a formal dinner or a boardroom, but a raw, constant clamor of traffic and

vendors and neighbors arguing through thin apartment walls, a city that didn’t care in theslightest who her father was, because no one in it had ever heard his name.

The freedom of that was, for a while, intoxicating.

They found a one-room apartment above a laundromat, paid for in cash for the first three months with the money sewn into Nora’s coat lining, and furnished it slowly with whatever they could carry home from the secondhand shops two streets over — a mattress, a single scarred wooden table, a hot plate that took four tries most mornings to light properly, two mismatched chairs that neither of them had chosen so much as claimed off a curb on trash day, still sturdy enough to sit in. It should have felt like a step down from everything she’d known. For those first weeks, it felt instead like the first home she’d ever actually chosen.

She spent her first free afternoon simply walking the neighborhood, alone, something she had never once been permitted to do at Kingstone House without a driver trailing a careful, watchful distance behind her. She bought a single peach from a fruit stand with coins Julien had left on the counter, ate it standing on the sidewalk with juice running down her wrist, and found herself laughing out loud at the sheer, ordinary pleasure of it — no security detail, no schedule, no one anywhere in the world who knew where she was standing at that exact moment. It felt, for the length of that peach, like the whole of what freedom was supposed

to mean.

“We need names for the neighbors,” Julien said, their second night in the apartment, sprawled on the mattress with a takeout container balanced on his chest, steam still rising off it into the cool evening air coming through the cracked window.

“Nora and — what am I, then? Can’t exactly go by Julien Etienne’s-son from the Kingstone estate.”

“Marcus,” Nora said, the first name that came to mind. “You look like a Marcus.”

“I do not look like a Marcus.”

“You absolutely look like a Marcus. Something about the eyebrows.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my eyebrows.”

“I didn’t say wrong,” Nora said, grinning despite herself. “I said Marcus.”

They laughed about it for longer than the joke deserved, the particular helpless laughter of two people running on adrenaline and no sleep and the giddy disbelief that they’d actually pulled it off — that the estate, the arranged marriage, the whole enormous machinery of her father’s plans, was genuinely, entirely behind them now, thirty miles and a border crossing away. It was, Nora would think much later, one of the last nights that felt entirely uncomplicated between them, the last night before the weight of actually building a life together began to press down on everything softer that had come before it.

In the beginning, at least, the poverty itself felt almost like an adventure — the two of themworking out, by trial and error, how to make a single hot plate produce something resembling a proper meal, how far a small bag of rice could be stretched across a week,

which of the corner shops sold vegetables a day past their best and therefore a third of the price. Julien knew more of this than she did, from a childhood of watching his father manage a household budget on a chef’s modest wages, and for those first weeks he

seemed to enjoy teaching her — patient in a way that reminded her, achingly, of the boy who’d once taught her to laminate butter into pastry without tearing it.

The money didn’t last as long as either of them had hoped. Nora had never managed a budget in her life — had never once, before that apartment, had to think about the cost of anything, because the cost of everything had simply been absorbed by a name she could no longer use. She learned, slowly and humiliatingly, how quickly a reserve of cash could disappear into rent and food and the hundred small necessities she’d never had to consider before: soap, bus fare, a coat warm enough for a climate colder than anything Kingstone House had prepared her for. She caught herself, more than once, doing the math of a purchase in her head and being startled all over again by how little was left to work with.

Julien found work faster than she did — a line cook position at a mid-tier restaurant two neighborhoods over, hours that stretched long and left him exhausted in ways she hadn’t anticipated, coming home most nights smelling of grease and dish soap, his hands red and cracked from hours under scalding water. Nora struggled to find anything at all, hampered by a lack of local paperwork, a lack of local experience, a resume that consisted, in its entirety, of skills no employer in that city had any use for. She went to interview after

interview in those first weeks, watching the same polite confusion cross one manager’s face after another as they tried to make sense of a young woman who spoke three languages, could discuss vintage wine pairings with any board member her father had ever entertained, and had never once, in her life, filled out a timesheet.

“I could ask about kitchen work,” she said one evening, watching Julien peel off his shoes after a fourteen-hour shift, wincing as he flexed his stiff fingers. “At your place, or somewhere else. I know how to cook, Julien. Properly. You’ve seen me.”

“You know how to bake in a kitchen with staff to do the cleanup,” Julien said, more tired than unkind, though the words still landed harder than he probably meant them to, harder than she suspected he’d intended in the moment. “It’s not the same as line work. Not the same pace, not the same pressure. I’m not saying you couldn’t learn it. I’m saying it’s not tomorrow’s problem, and I don’t have it in me tonight to explain the difference.”

Nora let it go, that night, because she was too proud to argue and too aware, in some quiet corner of her mind, that he wasn’t entirely wrong. But it was the first time in their new life together that she’d felt, however briefly, like a burden rather than a partner, and the feeling lodged somewhere in her chest and didn’t entirely leave, resurfacing at odd moments in the weeks that followed — watching him count out rent money at the table, watching him comehome too tired to do more than eat and sleep, watching the small, worried calculations move behind his eyes that she had no practical way of helping to solve.

The weeks passed in a rhythm that felt, for a while, almost sustainable — Julien’s long restaurant shifts, Nora’s slow, frustrating search for any work at all, evenings together that grew shorter as his exhaustion deepened and his patience, in small and easily dismissed ways, grew thinner. She told herself it was the adjustment. New country, new poverty, new pressure neither of them had ever had to carry before. She told herself it would settle, the way everything eventually settled, once they found their footing — that the version of him she’d fallen in love with in that kitchen, warm and unhurried and entirely present, was still there underneath the exhaustion, simply waiting for the pressure to ease enough to resurface.

She didn’t yet know how right, and how catastrophically wrong, that hope would turn out to be.