ONE YEAR, ONE HUSBAND
Book Six: The Contract Comes to Light
The headline was already trending by the time Grace called me, her voice tight with the particular panic of someone who has been awake reading comments sections since five in the morning.
"Mia. You need to see this before you leave the house."
I opened the link with coffee still in my other hand, and watched my entire carefully constructed life collapse into a single, ugly sentence across the front page of a gossip site I'd never had reason to read before that morning.
*EXCLUSIVE: BLAKE HEIR'S "FAIRY TALE" MARRIAGE WAS A PAID CONTRACT ALL ALONG — LEAKED DOCUMENTS REVEAL ONE-YEAR TERM, NO-LOVE CLAUSE.*
Beneath it, photographed clearly enough to read every line, was a copy of our marriage contract. Clause seven, underlined in red by whoever had leaked it, sat directly beneath a photo of the kiss from the Whitmore Gala, the one that had made me briefly, foolishly believe in something.
We do not fall in love.
Beneath the article, hundreds of comments had already piled up, strangers debating my character with the confidence of people who had never met me, alongside op-eds with titles like "What the Blake Contract Says About Modern Marriage" and a trending hashtag I refused to click on more than once. Somewhere in the noise, a single, smaller headline caught my eye and made my stomach drop further: a photo agency had apparently sold the paparazzi shot from the gala kiss to three separate outlets within the hour, meaning the one moment I had believed, foolishly, entirely real, was now being sold piece by piece to the highest bidder alongside everything else.
"How," I said, my voice not entirely steady, "did anyone get this?"
"It gets worse," Grace said. "There's a source quoted. Someone close to the family. They're not naming him, but Mia, the phrasing, the details, it reads like Noah."
I did not sleep, eat, or leave my room for most of that day, watching my own name trend under increasingly cruel variations of the word gold-digger, watching strangers dissect a private decision I had made to save my father's company as though it were the most obscene thing a woman had ever done for love of anything at all. A morning show ran a segment with a body language expert dissecting the gala kiss frame by frame, concluding, with an authority I found darkly funny under the circumstances, that my smile had been "performed rather than felt." Victor, of course, gave a brief statement to a reporter expressing his "concern for the family's reputation," which I noted, with a bitterness I didn't try to suppress, was the single most publicly supportive thing my own uncle had said about me since my father's funeral.
Grace came by at noon with soup I didn't eat and a stack of printouts I refused to look at, and sat with me in silence for a while before saying, carefully, "For what it's worth, Mia, I've read the comments too. Not all of them think you're the villain."
"Enough of them do."
"Enough of them think a lot of things," she said. "Doesn't make it true."
Ethan did not come find me until nearly evening, and when he did, he stood in my doorway with his phone still in his hand and an expression I couldn't read, careful and closed in a way that felt, after the honesty of the blackout night, like a door slamming shut in my face.
"I've spoken to the board," he said. "We're managing it."
"Managing it," I repeated. "That's what I am to you right now. A situation to manage."
"That isn't what I meant."
"Isn't it?" I stood up, my voice rising despite myself. "Half the country thinks I'm a gold-digger who trapped you into marriage, Ethan, and you haven't said one word publicly defending me. Not one. Your lawyers issued a statement about protecting company interests. Nothing about me."
"There are legal considerations—"
"I don't want legal considerations," I said. "I want my husband to say I'm not what they're calling me."
He didn't answer, and the silence stretched long enough that I understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, exactly how this would end if I let it. I had let myself believe, somewhere between the elevator and the ring and the careful way he'd started saying my name, that we had become something more than the eight pages we'd signed. But standing in my doorway, watching him choose silence over me, I understood that a contract was still, at its core, exactly what it said it was, and I had been foolish to think otherwise.
"I need some air," I said, and walked past him before he could see my face.
✲ ✲ ✲
I booked the flight that night, a small act of self-preservation disguised as a business trip, telling Grace only that I needed to see a supplier in Chicago and would be back within the week, though some smaller, more honest part of me knew I was leaving because I could not stand in that house one more day watching Ethan Blake decide, in real time, whether I was worth defending.
I made it through security in a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses that I had genuinely believed, at eleven at night while packing, constituted an effective disguise. I bought a coffee under a name that was not mine, avoided eye contact with a family clearly on their way to Disney World who had absolutely no idea who I was, and had almost convinced myself, somewhere around the halfway point of the terminal, that I had successfully vanished into the anonymous churn of an airport at dawn.
I did not make it past the gate.
"Going somewhere, Mrs. Blake?"
I turned, my heart lurching, to find Ethan standing three feet away in yesterday's shirt, looking like a man who had not slept either, his eyes moving over my hat and sunglasses with an expression that was fighting, unsuccessfully, not to be amused.
"How did you find me?"
"You booked the flight on the corporate account. I get an alert." A pause. "Also, Mia, you're wearing my sunglasses. I'd know them anywhere."
I pulled the sunglasses off, feeling considerably less mysterious than I had an hour ago. "This was a very good disguise until you said that."
"It was not, in fact, a good disguise at any point. You are also, for the record, the only woman in this terminal wearing an evening coat at six in the morning."
"It was the first thing I grabbed."
"It's cashmere. You grabbed the most expensive thing in your closet to flee quietly." Something almost fond flickered across his face despite the exhaustion in it. "That tracks, somehow."
He stepped closer, and around us I was aware of exactly how many phones were surreptitiously angled in our direction, strangers pretending not to film the Blake heir's wife attempting to flee the city in an evening coat and someone else's sunglasses. "Come home."
"Give me one good reason."
"Because you don't run from things, Mia Carter. I've watched you stand in a burning kitchen holding a ruined shirt like it personally insulted you. I've watched you walk into a room full of people who think you married me for money and correct every single one of them without raising your voice. You don't run. So whatever this is, it isn't really about Chicago."
"Maybe I just wanted to see the Bean," I said, which was such a transparent lie that he actually laughed, a short, startled sound that drew a few more phones in our direction.
"You hate Chicago. You told me so at the Hartwell dinner. You said, and I quote, 'a city that cold has no business also being that windy, it's excessive.'"
"I stand by that assessment."
"I'm sure you do. It's still not why you're standing at gate C14 in my sunglasses at six in the morning."
I felt my throat tighten, furious at how accurately he'd read me, furious that even now, mid-flight from him, he still knew exactly which words would land.
"You didn't defend me," I said, quieter now. "When it mattered. You went to your lawyers instead of to me."
"I know." He said it plainly, no excuses attached. "I handled it wrong. I've spent my whole life managing crises with strategy instead of people, because strategy doesn't leave, and people always have, eventually. My mother. My father, in every way that counted while he was still in the house. I didn't know how to do it differently, even when it was you standing in that doorway."
"That's not an apology."
"No," he agreed. "It's an explanation. The apology is this." He reached out, slowly, and took my hand, right there at the gate, in front of every phone aimed our way, no cameras arranged, no publicist coordinating the shot. "I'm sorry. I should have stood in front of every camera in this city and told them exactly what you are to me, and I didn't, because I was afraid of what it would mean to say it out loud where I couldn't take it back."
"And what is it?" I asked. "What am I to you?"
He didn't answer immediately, his jaw working, and for a moment I thought he would retreat again, choose silence the way he always did when the truth cost too much. Around us, the gate agent announced final boarding for my flight, a row of strangers shuffling past us toward the jet bridge, entirely uninterested in the two people standing motionless in the middle of the concourse like a stone in a river.
"You should know," he said, "that I told the board this morning I would step down from the succession vote entirely before I let anyone use a leaked contract to hurt you further. Noah can have the company, if it comes to that. I mean that, Mia. Whatever else I've gotten wrong."
"You didn't tell me that."
"I'm telling you now." His thumb moved once, absently, across my knuckles, like he wasn't fully aware he was doing it. "I've spent my whole life deciding that keeping people at arm's length was the only way to keep them at all. It worked, more or less, until a woman set my shirt on fire in my own kitchen and told me being an organized robot wasn't an insult."
"It wasn't a compliment either."
"No," he agreed, something almost like a smile ghosting at the corner of his mouth despite everything. "But it was the first true thing anyone had said to me in years, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since."
"I don't want you to leave," he said finally, low enough that only I could hear it, his hand tightening around mine like he was afraid I'd disappear the second he let go. "But I don't know what right I have to keep you, Mia. Not after this. Not after any of it."