Chapter 3

Liam came to me the day I was scheduled to fly back to France with Ethan. My bags were packed and waiting by the door, a one-way ticket to a life without him tucked safely in my purse. I sat on the edge of my bed, the darkness a heavy blanket around me, my resolve hardening with every silent minute that passed.

Then, the doorbell rang. It was him.

Ethan let him in, his voice stiff with disapproval. I heard Liam's footsteps approach, stopping right in front of me.

"Don't go, Ava," he said.

His voice was a low command, not a plea. There was no emotion in it, just a statement of fact.

"Marry me."

For a heart-stopping moment, hope flickered within me. A foolish, desperate hope that his coldness after the accident had been a reaction to shock, that he had finally realized what I meant to him. I thought my sacrifice had, in some twisted way, proven my love and now he was reciprocating.

"Why?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

"I need a wife," he said, as if explaining a business transaction. "You are suitable. Your family has a good name. You understand my work. It's a logical arrangement."

A logical arrangement. Not a declaration of love, not a passionate plea, but a cold, calculated proposal. There was no talk of love, of a future together, of children. He was offering me a position, not a partnership. The flicker of hope died, but my love for him, stubborn and idiotic, did not. I was a blind woman, my spirit broken, and he was offering me the one thing I wanted more than my sight, to be his.

I said yes.

Ethan was furious. He argued with me for hours, telling me Liam was using me, that a man who couldn't even thank me for saving his life could never truly love me. But I didn't listen. I convinced myself that his love was just different, that a genius like Liam expressed himself through action, not words. I was a fool. I walked into his trap with my eyes wide open, even though they couldn't see.

Now, lying in my bed, the truth of his motives was sickeningly clear. He didn't just need a wife, he needed a shield. He needed a blind wife.

My mind flashed to something I'd overheard years ago, a whispered rumor about an incident at a family gathering. Sophia, then eighteen, had apparently had too much to drink. She had followed Liam to the library, cornered him, and tried to kiss him. The staff said he had pushed her away so forcefully she fell, and then he fled the house, not returning for days. At the time, it was dismissed as a teenage girl's drunken crush. Now, I saw it a different way. It wasn't just her advance he was running from, it was his own response. He didn't marry me because he loved me, he married me to put a barrier between himself and the one person he truly desired, a person he knew he could never have.

With this new, horrifying clarity, I re-examined my five-year marriage. The signs were all there, a breadcrumb trail of lies I had blindly ignored. The separate bedrooms, which he claimed was because of his late-night work schedule. I now realized it was so he could spend his nights with his doll without fear of discovery. The frequent "business trips" where he was always unreachable. He wasn't in meetings, he was holed up somewhere, indulging his sick fantasies in private.

And the intimacy... oh God, the intimacy. It was the cruelest trick of all. He knew how much I craved his touch, his affection. So he built a machine to give it to me. A robot, programmed to mimic passion, to go through the motions so he wouldn't have to. Did he watch? Did he stand in the shadows, observing the charade, feeling a sick sense of control? The thought made me want to vomit. I had opened my body and my heart to a machine, believing it was the man I loved.

The meticulous cleaning afterward, which I had interpreted as an act of profound care, was now revealed for what it was, a clinical, detached procedure. He wasn't cherishing me, he was wiping away the evidence, removing any trace of the mechanical surrogate from my body, ensuring his perfect crime remained undiscovered. For five years, I had been living a lie, not just a lie told to me by Liam, but a lie I had told myself. I had been so desperate for his love that I had ignored every red flag, every cold word, every piece of evidence that screamed the truth. I wasn't his wife. I was his alibi.