Zara’s pov
I thought marrying a billionaire would be difficult because of his money.
I was wrong.
The hardest part was living with a man who had forgotten how to feel.
The Vance mansion looked like something out of a magazine spread.
I moved in on a Tuesday with two suitcases and a duffel bag, everything I owned in the world, and stood in the entryway feeling like I’d wandered onto the set of a movie about someone else’s life.
“Mrs. Vance.” A woman in a gray uniform appeared beside me, hands folded, “I’m Marta.
I oversee the household staff.
Please let me know if you require anything.”
“Zara’s fine,” I said.
“You don’t have to call me Mrs. Vance.”
Surprise flickered across her face, “Of course, ma’am.”
Dinner that first night happened in near total silence, the two of us seated at opposite ends of a long table.
“Is it always like this?” I asked.
He looked up, surprised I’d spoken at all.
“Like what?”
“Quiet. Empty. Like nobody actually lives here.”
“I have a lot on my mind.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He set his fork down, “This is how the house has always run.”
“That’s sad,” I said, and went back to my food before he could decide whether to be offended.
I learned everyone’s name within the first week, thanked the kitchen staff after every meal.
“You don’t have to do that,” Ethan told me once, watching me thank a maid for refilling my coffee.
“Do what? Say thank you to people who work hard?”
“It makes them uncomfortable.”
“Maybe they’re uncomfortable because nobody’s ever bothered to do it before.” I met his eyes across the kitchen island.
“That’s not a compliment to this house, Ethan.”
He didn’t have an answer for that one either.
I was starting to notice that happened a lot.
His family’s circle was a different kind of cold.
I met them properly at a dinner two weeks into the marriage, a room full of women, watching me over the rims of their wine glasses like I was a stray cat that had wandered in through an open door.
“How lovely,” one of them said, a woman named Cordelia something, “that Ethan found someone so… down to earth.”
“I try,” I said, smiling right back at her.
“And what did you say you did before? Hospitality, was it?”
“I worked at a lounge. I was very good at reading people who thought they were being subtle.” I held her gaze until she was the one who looked away first.
Another woman further down the table, older, leaned toward Ethan, as if I weren’t sitting close enough to hear every word.
“She’s certainly got spirit,” she whispered in a tone I didn’t like.
“You’ll want to get her some proper coaching before the Ashford gala. Etiquette, that sort of thing. It reflects on the family.”
“She doesn’t need coaching,” Ethan said, without looking up from his plate.
Word got around fast that I wasn’t going to shrink just because someone wanted me to.
Ethan started watching me differently after that dinner.
“You’re not what I expected,” he told me one night, both of us up late in the kitchen.
“What did you expect?” I frowned.
“Someone who’d take the money and disappear into the role.
Perform the part and collect the check.” He turned his glass slowly on the counter, “You keep being a person instead.”
“I don’t know how to be anything else,” I said.
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“You’re not disappointing anything.” The way he looked at me afterward made my chest go tight, because I had a secret sitting under my ribs that made every soft moment between us feel dangerous.
The one place in that entire mansion where I actually felt like myself was Richard’s room.
The man had built an empire.
He deserved better than being alone in his own house.
So I talked to him, properly.
“Ethan’s got a big shareholder meeting coming up,” I told him one evening, settling into the chair beside his bed.
“He’s been unbearable about it all week. Snapping at the poor assistant who brings him coffee.”
Richard’s eyes, which usually drifted somewhere distant when I talked, snapped to my face.
I kept going, distracted, telling him about the seating chart Ethan had been agonizing over.
“He rearranged it four times. Four times, Richard. I told him nobody cares where Victor Ashford sits as long as he’s fed.”
His eyes blinked.
Once, twice, then a third time, rapid enough that it didn’t look accidental.
I paused.
“You okay?”
He blinked again the same way, three sharp movements, his gaze locked onto mine with an intensity that made the hair on my arms rise.
I told myself it was a muscle spasm.
A side effect of the stroke and finished my tea, said goodnight, telling myself I was imagining things.
Two nights later, I mentioned the shareholder meeting again, and it happened exactly the same way.
Three blinks, sharp and deliberate, the moment I said Ethan’s name.
That was when I stopped believing it was a coincidence.
Tonight, I sat beside his bed with the newspaper unopened in my lap, watching him instead of reading to him for once.
“Richard,” I said slowly, “are you trying to tell me something?”
His hand moved.
Then he blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
I sat frozen in that chair, his hand wrapped around mine, my heart hammering against my ribs as the realization settled over me slow and impossible and absolutely certain.
He wasn’t having spasms, he was trying to talk to me and whatever he was trying so desperately to say must be really important.
“How am I going to understand you, Richard.” I whispered, frustrated.
“Or I could tell Ethan and he could…”
His face went into panic and I paused.
“You don’t want Ethan to know,” I said, finally.
And his face relaxed.
“Fuck, this is going to be hard, hiding the baby from him was already bad, now this…”