Chapter 1 The Strange Husband

Pov:lvy

The coffee pot trembled in my hand as if it's my first time holding a coffee pot.

I set it down before Damian could notice, but Margaret noticed everything and smiled wickedly. She always did. She watched me from the head of the table the way a hawk watches a field mouse, waiting to see if I would run or hide.

"You're late," Damian said, not looking up from his phone,l always prefer my coffee to be very hot.

"I apologize, sir." My voice came out steady. I had practiced that. Steady, flat, small without giving out any clue. The voice of a woman who had never once fallen asleep in his arms.

He finally lifted his eyes to me, and for one second, my heart stopped in my chest. Those were the same sexy gray eyes that used to soften every time he looked at me across a pillow. Now they moved over my face like I was a stranger standing in his kitchen. Because to him, I was just a house keeper.

"Do I know you?" he asked.

The question landed like a slap on my face.

"I'm the housekeeper, sir." I kept my eyes on the coffee pot, not on him. "Ivy."

"Ivy." He repeated my name the way you'd repeat a word in a foreign language, testing the shape of it in his mouth. Something flickered behind his eyes, there and gone so fast I told myself I imagined it. "Strange. You seem familiar."

Margaret's fork stopped halfway to her mouth.

"She has one of those faces," Margaret said smoothly, not even glancing at me. "Common."

Common. I had heard that word so many times in this house it no longer stung the way it used to. But hearing it now, while Damian sat two feet away wearing the watch I gave him for his thirtieth birthday and not remembering my hands had wrapped it, that stung plenty.

"Pour the coffee, Ivy," Margaret said, dismissing me without a second thought.

I moved around the table, my pulse loud in my own ears. This was the part I hated most. Being close enough to smell him, cedar and something warmer underneath, and not being allowed to reach out and touch and hold the man I loved and married.

I filled his cup. My sleeve brushed his sleeve and he went still.

Not the way people go still when a stranger touches them by accident. It is like the way you feel when something unexpected happens inside your own body, something you can't explain. His jaw tightened. His hand, resting on the table, curled into a slow fist and then released.

I stepped back too fast, coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim.

"Careful," Margaret snapped.

"Sorry, ma'am." I wiped the small spill with the cloth over my arm, grateful for an excuse to look down, to hide whatever was happening on my face.

Damian was still watching me with seriousness, I could feel it, the way you feel the sun on your skin even with your eyes closed.

"Have we met before?" he asked again, quietly this time, like the question belonged only to me.

Five years. That's what the doctors said. He'd lost five years, and I was buried somewhere in the wreckage of that time, along with our wedding, our secret apartment near the water, the nights he used to trace circles on my back and whisper that he didn't care what his mother or his family thought of me.

None of that existed to him anymore.

"I don't believe so, sir," I said. "I only started this work a few months ago."

The lie tasted like copper in my mouth and l deeply resent it.

He studied me a moment longer, and I made myself hold his gaze the way any housekeeper would, polite and unbothered,but Inside I was screaming his name the way I did every night outside his door, hoping some sleeping part of him would hear it and wake up.

"Finish your breakfast, Damian," Margaret said, folding her napkin with sharp precision. "Vanessa will be here at ten to discuss the engagement party."

The word engagement hit me harder than it should have, considering I already knew. Knowing and hearing it out loud in this room, standing three feet from my own husband, were two very different kinds of pain.

Damian's jaw tightened again, though I couldn't tell if it was about Vanessa or about me.

"Fine," he said, standing so abruptly his chair scraped against the floor.

He walked past me toward the door, close enough that his shoulder nearly grazed mine. I held my breath.

He stopped.

He didn't turn around. He just stood there, his back to me, one hand braced on the doorframe like the room had suddenly tilted beneath him.

"Ivy," he said.

Not housekeeper. Not you there. My name, spoken slow and low, like he was pulling it up from somewhere he didn't know existed inside him.

"Yes, sir?"

A long pause stretched between us, thick enough to choke on.

"Nothing," he said finally. "Forget it."

Forget it. If only he knew how much he already had.

He walked out without looking back, and I stood frozen by the table, my hand pressed flat against my chest where the chain of my wedding ring lay hidden beneath my collar, warm from my own skin.

Margaret's voice cut through the silence like a blade.

"A word, Ivy," she said. "Now."

I turned, and my stomach dropped straight through the floor.

She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the small gold locket that had slipped loose from beneath my collar when I leaned to pour the coffee, dangling in plain sight, catching the morning light.

She knew that locket.

She'd seen me wear it after my marriage to his son.