Escaping the Dead Wife's Shadow

Day five of the silent treatment. Killing time in Declan's study, my fingers brushed against cold metal in the back of his desk drawer. A burner phone. The screen lit up.

Only one contact. Little Fox. My stomach dropped as my eyes snagged on the last sent message. Everything is handled. Rest easy, my late wife. A violent tremor seized my hand.

I tapped the screen, unlocking a vault of secrets the rest of the world apparently already knew.

By the time I scrolled past the final social media post, fortyeight hours had evaporated. My eyes burned, bonedry and gritty.

The harsh buzz of the doorbell shattered the dead silence. Simon stood on the porch. He wouldn't meet my eyes. Pity dripped from his voice. "Mr. Declan has a gala tonight.

He won't be coming home." Exhaustion gnawed at my bones, leaving a hollow numbness in my chest. I dragged myself to the vanity.

With a heavy hand, I layered thick concealer over the tiny beauty mark just beneath my left eye. The exact same mark his dead wife, Celeste, had.

Back in the kitchen, a folded piece of paper sat on the island—my olive branch. A positive pregnancy ultrasound. My best friend told me to stay home.

She begged me not to walk in there and humiliate myself. I grabbed my keys anyway. I pushed through the heavy double doors of the ballroom.

The music and chatter hit me like a physical wall, but my vision tunneled straight to the center of the room. Declan.

Beside him stood a petite girl, her fingers curled possessively around his bicep. She turned her head, catching the chandelier's light.

Right beneath her left eye sat a tiny, dark mark. An exact match. No wonder he hadn't bothered to end our cold war this time. He didn't need to.

He had finally found a better lookalike. Chapter 1 I stood anchored in the darkest corner of the ballroom.

My eyes tracked his every move as he guided the girl through the sea of executives.

He introduced her with that practiced patience, making small talk, seamlessly taking her champagne flute to intercept a toast. Just like he used to do for me.

It took a long time, but his gaze finally swept the room and landed on me. His fingers remained interlaced with hers. A muscle ticked in his jaw as he registered my bloodless face.

His posture stiffened, and his voice carried across the space between us, sharper than broken ice. "Didn't Simon tell you?" He didn't wait for an answer. "I'm not coming back tonight.

And this isn't the place for your tantrums." The girl plastered to his side let her gaze drag up and down my body.

A smirk tugged at the corner of her lips. "Her concealer is caked on so thick. She's clearly going through it, Declan.

Don't be so mean to her." A phantom ache bloomed in my chest as the memory of our cold war slammed into me.

It all started because I dropped an old water glass he'd been using for years.

In the past, the sound of shattering glass would have him scooping me up into his arms, terrified a stray shard might graze my bare foot. But this time?

He had closed the distance in two strides, his fingers digging so hard into my upper arm I thought the bone would snap.

The veins in his neck popped. "Did you do that on purpose?" His grip tightened. "Just because I forgot your damn flowers?" He walked out that night and never came back.

It wasn't until I scrolled through the hidden posts on that burner phone that the puzzle pieces clicked together.

That glass was the last gift Celeste bought for him before the cancer took her. Back at the house, the tulips in my vase had already rotted to black mush.

The girl's sugary voice dragged me back to the present. "Declan, we haven't toasted that table over there yet.

Let's not waste our time here." All the witty, fiery comebacks I usually had loaded on my tongue turned to ash. My throat constricted, cutting off my air supply.

I couldn't force a single syllable past my lips. I just watched them walk away.

Once they were out of earshot, the whispers from the surrounding tables drifted over. "Isn't that Declan's old plusone? Did they finally split?" "She was just a bottle girl.

She got to play house and be spoiled rotten for three years. She should count herself lucky." My fingernails dug into the soft flesh of my palms. They were right.

I had been suffocated in Declan's bubble of privilege for so long, I practically forgot where I crawled out of.

If I hadn't been pushing overpriced liquor in a dim club, our paths would have never crossed. I was midpitch when my manager shoved me hard from behind. The tray tipped.

A splash of crimson wine stained the crisp white collar of his dress shirt. Panic seized me.

I grabbed a napkin, frantically dabbing at his chest, but a large hand clamped around my wrist like a steel vice. He didn't look at the stain.

His dark eyes locked onto mine, the heat in them searing right through my skin. "What's your name?" "Willow." My voice barely scraped out. "Beautiful." Declan was a psychopath wearing a gentleman's skin.

I turned down his first few attempts to ask me out. In response, he locked me inside his sprawling estate.

For twentyfour hours straight, he kept me pinned to his chest, refusing to let me go until the fight drained out of me and I finally gave in.

He wiped every male contact from my phone. He tracked every single swipe of my credit card. He would tilt my chin up, his thumb tracing my jawline. "What are you looking at?

I'm the only world you need." My best friend warned me. She said he treated me like property, that a love this suffocating would eventually implode. She told me to run.

Chapter 2 Suffocating? Whenever he wanted to make me smile, Declan would buy out entire auction catalogs.

He spent hours in the kitchen mastering bland, nutritious recipes just because my stomach was acting up.

Outside of the boardroom, his undivided attention was a laser beam focused entirely on me. Wealth. Love. Every single thing I had ever starved for.

The more demanding I became, the deeper he drowned me in luxury.

No one knew that when I was a kid, digging crumpled snack wrappers out of the trash just to lick the leftover salt, my father would drag me by my hair and beat me breathless.

For the longest time, I was convinced my bones were just fundamentally unlovable. And the sick punchline? I was right.

I was just a parasite hiding in another woman's shadow, siphoning off affection that never belonged to me. But what was I supposed to do now?

He had trained me into a spoiled thing who refused to bow her head. I stared at the back of the girl's violet evening gown for one long, silent second.

Then, I turned my back on the ballroom and walked out. The digital footprint on that burner phone had been meticulously curated.

I had scrolled through enough of it to perfectly hallucinate Celeste's voice and smile. She loved violet. She adored tulips.

She used an eyeliner pencil to draw a tiny dot under her left eye, claiming it made her look sexier.

A pampered heiress whose blinding radiance couldn't be muted, not even by the greyscale of a memorial portrait. Declan hadn't just spoiled me.

He had surgically molded my personality to mirror hers.

But the second I was shoved out of the golden cage he built, I reverted to that pathetic shadow in the dark, paralyzed by panic. The night air bit into my skin on the cab ride home.

My screen stayed pitch black. Five days. One hundred and twenty hours. Not a single word from Declan.

Back in the house, the little gift box still sat on the kitchen island, wrapped in a flawless silk bow.

On the day we fought, I had actually told myself that since he always chased after me, I would be the one to wave the white flag this time.

I dragged a pair of scissors through the ribbon. Inside lay the crisp, blackandwhite sonogram. I had spent hours hallucinating the exact look on Declan's face when he opened it.

Now, staring at the glossy paper, the only thing echoing in the kitchen was the deafening silence of a joke with no punchline. He didn't want this.

In the desolate chat history of that burner phone, Declan had fired off the exact same text into the void, over and over again.

Celeste, I will only ever have one wife in this lifetime. And since his wife was dead and buried… this baby had no business being born, did it?

In the beginning, he had the estate rigged with a fortress of security protocols just to keep me from wandering off.

If I stepped off the property line for more than ten minutes, alarms would trip on his phone. Tonight? I packed a duffel bag and took an Uber to Roxy's apartment. No sirens wailed.

No unhinged voicemails flooded my inbox. Lying on Roxy's couch, my thumb mindlessly swiped through Twitter. A trending headline hit me right between the eyes.

Tech Billionaire Declan Set to Marry Heiress Madison… So that was the girl in the violet dress. Madison. Roxy snatched the phone right out of my hand.

She gave me a hard look. "Don't be an idiot, Willow. Before he tosses you out with the trash, you need to burn the bridge yourself.

Otherwise, you're going to cave and go crawling right back to him." First thing the next morning, Roxy drove me to the clinic. We booked the abortion.

I sat in the plastic waiting room chair, my thumb hovering over Declan's contact. A sick, twisted part of me debated telling him. Right on cue, my screen vibrated.

Two audio messages popped up from him. It was a first in five days. Was he finally caving? Was he coming to find me?

Clinging to the absolute last, pathetic shred of hope, I pressed play. A voice purred through the speaker.

It wasn't Declan. "Hey there." Madison's syrupy voice echoed through the sterile hospital corridor, loud enough for the receptionists to hear. "Did you know he changed your contact name to Nuisance?

Do you want to guess what he saved me as?" A soft, triumphant giggle. "Little Fox." My acrylic nails bit so deeply into the flesh of my palm that the skin broke.

The sharp, stinging pain was the only thing tethering me to gravity.

Down the hall, Roxy waved a patient intake clipboard at me. "Willow, you're up." Ten minutes later, I was staring at the harsh fluorescent lights above the surgical table.

My mind drifted to the custom tulip necklace Declan and I had designed together. It had been at the jeweler for six months.

Whenever I asked about it, he'd kiss my forehead and claim the craftsmanship wasn't quite perfect yet, that I just needed to be a little more patient.

But when I had cracked open that desk drawer to find his burner phone, the velvet jewelry box had been sitting right next to it. I had popped the lid.

The engraved script on the back of the golden petal didn't say my name. It read: Declan & Celeste. I was a ghost. An understudy who had just been written out of the script.

The doctor adjusted the stirrups. There was absolutely nothing left to wait for. Chapter 3 When my eyelids finally fluttered open, the harsh clinic lights burned my retinas.

Roxy was sitting right there. She told me tears had been silently streaming down my face the entire procedure, so much that I nearly gave the anesthesiologist a panic attack.

I whispered an apology. The physical pain in my lower abdomen was barely a dull ache.

Instead, there was just a hollow, crushing gravity in my chest, pinning me down—the exact same sensation I felt the day my parents signed their divorce papers.

My mother had thrown me away. Now, Declan had thrown me away, too. Thank god Roxy hadn't given up on me.

She owned the club where I used to push bottles, and beneath her tough exterior, she was fiercely protective.

She told me I had the right to start over a million times if I needed to.

If the air in this city was suffocating me, I just needed to pack up and breathe somewhere else. "Willow, do you want to swing by the house to pack your things?" I shook my head.

A slow, heavy motion. Every single preference I had, every silk dress, plushie, instrument, and bouquet of flowers—Declan had meticulously curated them.

They were Celeste's favorites. None of it belonged to me. After Roxy signed my discharge papers, she practically carried me to the passenger seat of her SUV.

On the drive back, we got stuck at a red light in the highend shopping district. I stared blankly out the window.

Through the pristine glass of a flagship jewelry boutique, a familiar silhouette caught my eye. Declan.

He was standing motionless in front of the diamond display cases, lost in thought.

For three years, I had lost track of how many nights I had curled up against his chest, playfully begging him to marry me. My answer was always just a kiss to the forehead.

An evasion. Now, he was probably picking out a diamond for someone else. Maybe to him, a corporate marriage alliance didn't count as a real wife.

But I didn't even qualify for the alliance. I pulled out my phone and swiped open a travel app. A oneway ticket to Sedona.

Roxy always said the red rocks and the quiet desert were the best places to heal a broken body.

Right as the confirmation screen popped up, a banner notification slid down from Declan. I have a surprise for you at the gala in three days. Simon will come pick you up.

I stared at the glowing pixels for a long, quiet minute. A dry, humorless exhale escaped my lips. Declan, what was the point of this? I didn't need your surprises anymore.

Nine hours until my flight. I took an Uber back to the sprawling estate one last time. There were two things I needed to leave behind. I pushed the heavy front door open.

The smart home security system, which hadn't been armed in days, suddenly let out a sharp chirp.

Before I could even register the sound, a pair of heavy arms clamped around my waist.

The heat of a broad chest pressed flush against my back, trapping me in place. "Still hiding out at Roxy's?

Haven't you dragged this out long enough?" Declan's deep voice vibrated against the shell of my ear, dropping into that dangerously soft, coaxing register he always used. "Next time, don't touch things that have been around for a while.

I had the housekeeper pack the broken pieces away." It sounded like a reminder. It felt like a warning. But Declan, there wasn't going to be a next time.

I glanced at the kitchen island. The rotting tulips had been replaced with fresh, vibrant blooms. Like the fight never happened.

Like Celeste's ghost hadn't just shattered my entire reality. "I missed you…" He leaned his weight into me, his breath ghosting over my cheek. He turned my jaw, aiming for my lips.

I jerked my head away. "My period started," I lied, my voice flat. "The cramps are bad. Don't kiss me." It was terrifying. Just weeks ago, I would have melted into his touch.

Now, every nerve ending in my body screamed in rigid resistance. Declan froze. He sensed the shift. He slowly stepped around to face me.

His pitchblack eyes dropped to my face, his pupils expanding until they nearly swallowed his irises.

The silence stretched, thick and dangerous, a heavy, suffocating weight that threatened to pull me under.

Just as his hand lifted toward my neck, his phone vibrated sharply against his suit pocket.

He let out a slow, controlled breath and stepped back, dropping his hand. "I have a meeting with some overseas investors.

I have to go." He reached out, his thumb dragging rough over my knuckles before letting go. "I'll give you exactly what you want at the gala." What I wanted?

Right now, the only thing I wanted was to run. I stood frozen until the low purr of his Aston Martin faded down the driveway. My shoulders dropped.

I walked over to the marble island and unzipped my tote bag. I pulled out two pieces of paper. The first was the clinic's abortion discharge summary.

The second was a handdrawn sketch of a wedding ring. I had poured my entire heart into that design, keeping it hidden, waiting for the perfect moment to surprise him.

But since he was just going to carve his dead wife's name into the metal anyway, he could have it now. I set them side by side on the cold stone.

Beside them, I uncapped a pen and scribbled a single line on a sticky note. Hope you get exactly what you wished for. I turned around. The heavy front door clicked shut behind me.

Chapter 4 The night sky outside the airplane window stretched into an endless, inky abyss.

Roxy's head rested heavy on my shoulder, her breathing evening out as exhaustion dragged her under. I checked the screen on the seatback in front of me. Ninethirty.

The billionaire's gala was definitely in full swing by now. Declan never lacked beautiful women to drape on his arm.

From tonight on, Madison would officially take her place as his fiancé.

Before heading to the airport, I had fenced a few designer bags, some jewelry, and that limitededition watch to pad a brandnew debit card.

Declan's Centurion black card was dead to me. Even if he didn't care enough to track my spending history to find me, I was done.

I had been spoonfed a life of obscene luxury for so long, but I still knew how to survive in the dark. The cash I liquidated would keep me afloat for a long time.

I closed my eyes, letting the low hum of the jet engine vibrate through my bones. I was so drained that right as I skirted the edge of sleep, my brain started hallucinating.

A voice I knew down to the marrow of my bones was murmuring a request to a flight attendant. "Please bring a light blanket and a glass of warm water for the lady in the blue dress up ahead." …It sounded too real.

The low timbre vibrated from the row diagonally behind me. I rubbed my dry eyes and turned my head. My gaze collided straight into Declan's pitchblack stare.

The man who was supposed to be the center of gravity at a highsociety ballroom was sitting on my flight.

The flight attendant offered a polite, practiced smile. "Is this lady your friend, sir?" "No." His voice was a flat, terrifying baseline.

But his pupils were dilated, swallowing the light as they pinned me to my seat. "She is my fiancée." The second we stepped off the jet bridge into the terminal, Declan's hand clamped around my wrist.

His grip was a steel vise, the pressure biting down to the bone.

Roxy cursed at him, swatting at his solid forearm, but he didn't even flinch. "Since when do you take vacations without checking in with me?" He still thought I was throwing a tantrum.

He pried my fingers open and shoved the heavy metal black card back into my palm. The titanium was still warm from his body heat.

He didn't look at Roxy when he spoke to her. "Whatever my fiancée wants to do on this trip, I will personally accompany her.

You are dismissed, Roxy." "Fiancée?" My throat was tight, refusing to work, but Roxy let out a harsh, barking laugh. "Then tell me, Declan.

Did you happen to see the little surprise your fiancée left for you on the kitchen island?" A muscle feathered in Declan's jaw. The silence between us stretched thick and heavy