Chapter 1: The Night I Stopped Pretending

Three years of slipping into cold sheets that weren’t mine, pretending to be someone else in the dark—I was finally done.

It was the kind of exhaustion that seeps into your bones—the sort you get after pulling three graveyard shifts in a row, staring at the sun rising through grimy kitchen windows. I lay in that bed, the sheets cool and impersonal, and begged Logan Callahan to give me a real place in his life.

He just looked at me, unmoved. “You’re the lady’s personal maid. If I took you in, wouldn’t that be a slap in her face?”

The way he said it—like it was just business, not a matter of hearts and homes—cut deeper than any cold shoulder. My chest tightened, the air suddenly too thin, like I’d been left out in the Idaho winter again. I closed my eyes in despair, my knuckles twisting hard in the folds of the comforter.

Everyone in the house knew how deeply the young heir loved his wife.

The next day, I knelt before Mrs. Callahan, the matriarch, and offered myself as a widow bride—a woman married in name only to the dying eldest son, never to remarry.

My knees dug into the thick wool rug, but it was the shame burning in my cheeks that hurt more. In the dim light of her sitting room, Mrs. Callahan’s voice was warm, tinged with that classic Southern gentleness. “After the ceremony, you must remain a widow for your husband. Sweetheart, have you truly thought this through?”

I lowered my gaze, folding my hands in my lap the way good girls do in church. “I’ll never regret it, ma’am.” My heart pounded, but my words came out steady as a vow.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the young heir and his wife go pale as ghosts.