The husband she never wanted

6

Alessia had always believed answers were supposed to make things easier.

That was the problem.

Yesterday had given her answers, and somehow everything felt worse.

The photocopies Victor had handed her the night before were still spread across the coffee table exactly where she'd left them. She hadn't touched them in nearly an hour. The morning sunlight spilled through the floor-to-ceiling windows of her apartment, washing the room in warm gold and casting long shadows across the hardwood floor, but she barely noticed any of it. Her attention kept returning to the same page no matter how many times she looked away.

Her father's signature.

Three weeks before his death.

She knew every detail of it. Every stroke of the pen. Every slight slant in the lettering. Growing up, she'd seen that signature on everything from birthday cards to business documents. He used to sign books he gave her as gifts when she was younger, writing little notes on the inside cover and insisting she keep them because one day they'd mean something.

He'd been right.

Just not in the way either of them would've expected.

The page trembled slightly between her fingers as she stared at it. Nothing about it made sense.

Her father wasn't careless.

He wasn't reckless.

And he definitely wasn't the sort of man who signed contracts without understanding what they meant. One of the earliest arguments she'd ever had with him had been over a subscription she'd accidentally signed up for online when she was fourteen. He'd spent nearly forty minutes explaining why people should always read every line before agreeing to anything. At the time she'd thought he was being dramatic. Now she could practically hear his voice in her head every time she looked at the papers sitting in front of her.

Read everything. Twice. Then read it again.

The memory made something twist painfully inside her chest.

Because that was exactly why none of this felt right.

If her father had signed the agreement, then he had done it for a reason.

And if he'd done it for a reason, why had nobody been willing to tell her what that reason was?

That question had followed her home from the meeting with Victor. It followed her into the shower. It followed her into bed. It followed her through the restless few hours she'd managed to sleep. No matter how many times she turned it over in her head, she kept arriving at the same place.

Someone wasn't telling her everything.

Maybe it was her uncle.

Maybe it was her aunt.

Maybe it was Damien's family.

Maybe it was all of them.

But somebody knew more than they were saying.

Alessia pushed herself off the couch and began pacing the apartment again. The movement had become almost automatic at this point. Whenever she felt trapped inside her own thoughts, she walked. From the living room to the kitchen. From the kitchen to the windows overlooking the city. Then back again. A slow restless circuit that never seemed to take her anywhere.

Outside, life continued as though nothing had happened.

Cars crawled through traffic below.

A woman walked her dog along the opposite sidewalk.

Someone stepped out of the café across the street carrying two coffees and laughing at something their companion had said.

Everything looked normal.

Which somehow made her own situation feel even more absurd.

Seven days. Maybe four days now. She was apparently supposed to marry a man she'd barely met because of an agreement signed years ago by people who were either dead or refusing to explain themselves.

she looked at the document. Her eyes drifted lower, moving past her father's signature and the date that had occupied her thoughts for almost twenty-four hours. She wasn't even consciously looking for anything anymore. At some point her reading had become little more than staring, her attention snagging on certain words before drifting away again. The pages were filled with legal terminology, conditions, obligations, clauses that seemed determined to stretch a simple agreement into thirty different pages of language nobody would willingly read unless they were being paid to do so.

And yet something made her stop.

The witness section.

At first she barely paid attention to it. Her mind had been so consumed by her father's signature that everything else on the page had faded into the background. The witness line was just another signature. Another name. Another piece of information she assumed wouldn't matter.

Then her gaze moved back.

A small frown appeared between her brows. For a second she couldn't figure out why. The feeling came before the understanding did. A strange pull in the back of her mind. The unmistakable sensation of recognizing something without immediately knowing where the recognition came from.

Slowly, she leaned forward.

The paper rustled softly in her hands as she brought it closer. Her eyes settled on the name again. She read it once. Then again. This time more carefully. The letters remained exactly the same.

Neat. Deliberate. Familiar. A chill worked its way down her spine.

Not because the name itself was frightening. Because it wasn't. It belonged to someone she knew. Someone she had known for years. Someone who, according to every version of events she'd been told so far, should never have been connected to this document.

Her heartbeat began to quicken.

The apartment around her seemed to disappear little by little as her attention narrowed completely onto the page in front of her. The traffic outside faded into background noise. The television in the neighbouring apartment became distant and meaningless. Even the sunlight pouring through the windows felt less noticeable.

There was only the document. Her father's signature. And the name beneath it.

Memories surfaced almost immediately. Not one specific memory. Several. Conversations she hadn't thought about in years. Faces around dinner tables. Family gatherings. Business events. Casual remarks that had seemed insignificant at the time and suddenly felt a lot less insignificant now.

The more she stared at the witness line, the more uncomfortable she became.

Because the problem wasn't simply that she recognized the name. The problem was that the name created questions she didn't know how to answer. If that person had witnessed the signing, then they had known about the agreement from the beginning.

Not recently. Not after her father's death. From the beginning. Which meant they had spent years saying nothing.

Years.

Alessia slowly lowered the document into her lap and stared at the opposite wall without really seeing it.

Her thoughts were moving too fast now.

She had spent the last day assuming the answers were buried somewhere inside the contract itself. Inside the clauses. Inside the signatures. Inside the legal language. But what if the contract wasn't the thing she was supposed to be looking at?

What if the important part wasn't what had been signed?

What if it was who had been standing in the room when it happened?

The realization settled over her slowly, bringing with it a growing sense of unease. Because the more she thought about it, the less she liked where her thoughts were leading.

Her eyes dropped back to the witness section.

A sharp knock suddenly echoed through the apartment. The sound made her jump. The document slipped slightly in her hands but she didn't move still in a daze.. Somebody had been lying to her for a very long time.

And for the first time since this nightmare begin, she wasn't sure she wanted to know who.

The knock came again, pulling Alessia out of her thoughts.

Her head snapped toward the door. Alessia swallowed, glancing between the door and the papers. Her pulse quickened.

Suddenly, the apartment felt too exposed. The scattered documents on the table, her notes, everything in plain sight. Whoever walked in now, would see everything.

That thought made her move. She rushed to gather the papers, stacking them quickly, forcing them back into Victor’s folder. Her hands weren’t steady, but she didn’t stop.

Another knock.

Alessia crossed to the TV cabinet and shoved the folder inside, hiding it behind old magazines. She just stood there, staring at it, breathing uneven.

She turned toward the door, straightened her shoulders, and smoothed her expression.

Then she walked forward.