"Honey, every moment tonight is precious. We only get one night a week. I want..."
I closed my eyes and let her kiss me.
The hunger she showed—was it all an act?
By the time I woke the next morning, she was already gone. That was just who she was: disciplined to a fault, always at the office before eight.
She'd left the investment proposal on the coffee table, along with a handwritten note:
"Honey, head out today. Muyuan's headquarters is in Southport, not too far from home..."
"You can come back every Tuesday. That's me being selfish. Hehe..."
The sweetness between us made everything from the day before feel impossibly unreal.
I refused to accept it. I grabbed our marriage certificate and went back to the courthouse.
When I walked out, the last shred of hope I'd been clinging to finally died.
The clerk told me to my face: our certificate was forged. Daniela Pruitt was already legally married. Her spouse's name was Geoffrey Harding.
I rounded a corner, and something inside me snapped. I tore the certificate to shreds like a man possessed, scattering the pieces into the air like confetti at a funeral.
I watched the fragments drift past my head, and the memories came flooding back.
Daniela and I had met six years ago, in the dead of winter. By my count, that was the same year Geoffrey had just left the country for his studies abroad.
Back then, I was a team lead in advertising at a small firm. She'd joined my team fresh out of college.
By the end of that year, the company decided to gut our entire department.
At the farewell dinner, emboldened by too many drinks, I announced I was going to start my own business and asked if anyone wanted to come with me.
Most of them laughed, clapped me on the back, and turned me down with one excuse or another.
But Daniela was different. She looked me dead in the eye and said she believed in me. Said she wanted to stay and build something together.
And so we did. Two people against the world. Somewhere along the way, what started as solidarity became something deeper.
With that bond between us, we poured everything into the company. It grew. It stabilized. We built the life we'd once only dreamed about.
As for Geoffrey, Daniela hadn't hidden him from me at first. She'd been upfront about it—told me she had a first love named Geoffrey Harding, and that when they graduated college, he chose studying abroad over staying with her.
One night, after too much wine, she told me she hated him. Hated him for abandoning her without a second thought.
Only now did I finally understand: the moment Geoffrey came back to the States, every ounce of that hatred had turned right back into love.
She'd planned ahead for it. When she married me, she'd made sure the certificate was fake.
To Daniela, I was the man who built her career. Geoffrey had always been the man she kept hidden in her heart.
All the elaborate deception she was maintaining now probably came down to gratitude. She felt she owed me something and couldn't bring herself to break me.
Thinking back on everything we'd been through, I still couldn't let go.
I've always been the type to feel too deeply. She'd lied to me, but I refused to believe there had never been a single genuine spark between us.
I didn't go to Muyuan Investments to discuss the project. Instead, I tracked down the Pruitt Group's subsidiary—Roseling Corp.
In the conference room at Roseling Corp, Geoffrey and I sat across from each other.
When I laid everything out in the open, he didn't flinch. He freely admitted he'd known about me all along. He'd known exactly who I was the moment he saw me at the courthouse yesterday.
After all, he was the one legally married to Daniela. So naturally, he carried himself through the entire conversation like a man looking down from a throne.
"Otto Delgado, right? Daniela's actually mentioned you to me. Told me all about your little... arrangement."
