His Unseen Love, Her Blind Regret

For five years, I was the perfect husband to my wife, Jorja. I was the man who supposedly healed her broken heart after her first love, Cale, left her. Now Cale was back, and she insisted we all have dinner together.

Suddenly, a fight broke out at the next table. A man flung a bowl of steaming hot soup, and it flew directly towards us.

In that split second, I watched my wife lunge. Not towards me, but towards Cale, shielding him with her own body. The scalding liquid hit my arm and chest, the pain searing through me.

While I gasped in agony, Jorja fussed over a tiny splash on Cale's hand.

"We need to go to the emergency room right now!" she cried, rushing him out the door.

She paused only to look back at me. "I'm so sorry," she said. "You can take a taxi to the hospital, right?"

After five years of selfless care, of giving up my art scholarship to Paris to be her live-in cure, I was abandoned, covered in second-degree burns.

As I sat alone in the ER, an email arrived. My scholarship had been reinstated. That night, I didn't go back to her house. I went to start the life she had stolen from me.

Chapter 1

Arvin Benjamin carefully plated the pan-seared scallops, arranging them exactly as Jorja Romero liked them, a perfect semi-circle around a small mound of saffron risotto. He wiped a stray drop of butter from the rim of the porcelain plate, his movements practiced and precise after five years of this routine.

He carried the plate into the dining room. The vast, empty space echoed with the soft clink of his shoes on the marble floor. Jorja was already at the table, a single perfect rose in a crystal vase beside her, a detail Arvin never forgot.

She didn't look up. Her face was illuminated by the cool blue light of her phone, her thumb scrolling endlessly.

"Dinner's ready, Jorja," Arvin said softly.

"Mm," she hummed, not taking her eyes off the screen.

Arvin set the plate down in front of her. He knew she wouldn't start eating until she was ready. He sat across from her, the ten-foot mahogany table a chasm between them. He waited. He was good at waiting.

Her phone screen lit up with a notification, and for a fleeting second, Arvin saw the name that was a constant ghost in their home.

Cale.

A familiar ache, dull and deep, settled in his chest. He clenched his fork, the metal cold against his skin, then consciously relaxed his grip. He picked at his own, simpler meal. He had learned long ago not to expect conversation.

Suddenly, his own phone buzzed on the table, a sharp, intrusive sound in the quiet room. Jorja glanced up, a flicker of annoyance in her eyes, before returning to her screen.

Arvin looked at the caller ID. Goldie Buck. The director of the orphanage where he grew up. His mentor, his mother figure.

He excused himself and walked out onto the veranda, the cool night air a welcome relief.

"Goldie," he answered, his voice warmer than it had been all evening.

"Arvin, my boy," her voice was kind, but laced with a familiar worry. "Are you alright? How are things with... with her?"

Arvin leaned against the railing, looking out at the perfectly manicured garden. A single night-blooming jasmine was unfurling its petals, its scent sweet and fleeting.

He paused for a long moment, the silence stretching between them.

"The contract is up," he finally said, his voice quiet.

"I know. That's why I'm calling."

He didn't need to explain more. Goldie knew everything. She knew about the five-year agreement.

"He's back, isn't he? Cale Oneill," Goldie said, her tone heavy with understanding. "I saw in the news he finalized his divorce."

"Yes," Arvin confirmed. "Jorja has been... preoccupied."

"That girl never saw what was right in front of her," Goldie sighed, and Arvin could picture her shaking her head. "You gave up that scholarship to Paris for her, Arvin. You gave up five years of your life."

He closed his eyes. The scholarship. It felt like a dream from another lifetime. His hands, which now knew the exact temperature for Jorja's morning coffee, had once been destined to hold brushes in the finest studios in the world.

"It was a debt I had to repay," he said, the words tasting like ash.

"A debt you've paid a hundred times over," Goldie said firmly. "I called the Kellerman Arts Foundation. The scholarship, Arvin... they're willing to reinstate it. They remember your portfolio. They want you."

Hope, a dangerous and unfamiliar feeling, fluttered in his chest. He looked back through the glass door at Jorja, who was now taking a delicate bite of the scallop, her eyes still fixed on her phone. Five years. He had spent five years trying to paint a masterpiece on a canvas that didn't want him, and his own canvas had gathered dust.

"I want it," he said, his voice tight with emotion. "Goldie, I want to go. As soon as possible."

"I'll make the arrangements," she promised. "You just get yourself free."

As they said their goodbyes, the jasmine flower on the vine seemed to shudder in the breeze, its petals falling to the ground below. An ending.

The memory of the contract signing was as vivid as if it were yesterday. He was nineteen, a scholarship student sponsored by the wealthy Romero family. He was an orphan, a charity case, but one with talent. Elizebeth Rogers, Jorja's mother, had summoned him to her study. While other sponsored students sent polite thank-you cards, Arvin had painted a portrait of Elizebeth's late husband from a photograph, a gift of gratitude that had moved her deeply.

It was that gratitude she decided to call upon.

"My daughter, Jorja," Elizebeth had said, her voice strained, "is heartbroken. Her childhood sweetheart, Cale Oneill, left her to marry another woman and move overseas."

Arvin remembered the stories. Jorja, the city's darling, had become a recluse. She had stopped eating, stopped seeing friends, a beautiful doll slowly breaking on a shelf.

"I need you to save her," Elizebeth had pleaded. "I need you to make her forget him. I will pay you, support your art, anything. But I need you to pursue her, marry her, and stay with her for five years. By then, Cale will be a distant memory."

He had been so young, so indebted. He had looked at the acceptance letter from the Parisian art school in his pocket, the dream of a lifetime. Then he had looked at the desperate mother in front of him. He had signed the contract. He had given up Paris.

His pursuit was a work of performance art. He orchestrated "chance" meetings, learned her favorite flowers, her favorite music, her favorite foods. He became known in their social circle as the devoted, lovesick artist who had won the heart of the broken socialite.

The closest he ever came to believing it was real was a year into their marriage. At a high-stakes charity auction, the prize was a sapphire necklace called the "Sea God's Heart." Cale had once promised it to Jorja. When a rival bidder drove the price up, Arvin, without a thought, put his entire life savings on the line to win it for her. He remembered the look in her eyes as he placed it around her neck-a flicker of something real, something vulnerable.

"Marry me, Arvin," she had whispered that night. "Let's try... let's try to make this real."

His heart had soared. But the next morning, he saw Cale's social media. A post announcing his wife's pregnancy. Jorja's proposal hadn't been for him. It had been a desperate, defiant act aimed at a man an ocean away.

Still, he stayed. He had a contract to fulfill. He cooked, he cleaned, he managed their life. He learned to make her favorite seafood pasta, even though she would often not show up for dinner, having flown to Europe on a whim because she heard Cale might be there. He planned birthday parties she never attended, buying extravagant gifts that gathered dust in a storage room.

Once, she fell ill with a severe flu. He stayed by her bedside for three days and three nights, sponging her feverish brow, coaxing broth into her. In her delirium, she had clutched his hand, her lips cracked and dry.

And she had whispered one name, over and over.

"Cale... Cale..."

That was the moment Arvin's last ember of hope died. He had accepted then that his role was not to be her husband, but her caretaker. A placeholder.

Now, five years had passed. The contract was ending. Cale was back.

His job was done. It was time to live.