Page 82 of Marry Lies
My husband. Kind. Generous. Thoughtful. There for me during my darkest of days. Happy almost two weeks of marriage, darling.
My heart is hammering in my chest as I read it twice. Three times. Just as I’m about to ask her why she posted it, my phone begins to vibrate.
“Yes?” I ask my brother.
“Have you checked your email?” Chase asks.
My brows furrow. “No. Why?”
“We’d had like fifteen inquiries from people asking to meet with us.”
I rub the back of my neck. “Really?”
“Yeah,” he laughs. “I could kiss your wife, Miles.”
I ignore the spike of jealousy floating through me at his words. “Well, I’ll have to thank her in the morning.”
“She has a lot of followers. Have you seen some of these comments? People fucking love her. The picture of you guys already has twenty thousand likes.Twenty thousand.I guess a lot of people didn’t realize you two were married. The power of social media,” he adds, chuckling.
People fucking love her—of course they do. Who wouldn’t?
I swallow, but before I can respond, Chase continues. “It’s going to be a busy rest of the week. I’ll have Shira book in as many people as we can.”
I nod once. It’s strange—suddenly feeling like maybe everything might be okay with RCF.Fifteen inquiries over the course of half an hour.
He’s not wrong. This could be a turning point for us.
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“Wow. She’s really milking this whole fake marriage thing,” he says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Check her account. She posted a story.”
I glance at my screen, tapping back to the picture of us, and clicking over to her profile. I tap on her profile picture, and it’s a story of her lying in her bed, the orange duvet pulled up to her chin. She’s smiling in the way that makes my heart gallop, and before I know what I’m doing, I screenshot the picture.
Goodnight from the Ravages. x
My pulse is whooshing in my ears. “Look, I should go,” I tell Chase.
“Go thank your wife for saving our asses,” he murmurs. “Have a good night, brother,” he adds before ending the call.
Before I know what I’m doing, I lean back against my headboard and start to scroll through my wife’s Instagram account. It’s a mix of travel photos, pictures of her designs, outfits, and then I stop when I see a picture of her with an older woman. It’s obviously her grandmother, and it looks as though they’re in Paris.
My whole heart.
Her caption makes me pause, and I reframe everything I know about Estelle. She’s obviously still grieving—I can sense it in the way her face softens anytime someone mentions her grandmother. The night of the fountain, the taxi…she was grieving.My hand comes up to my neck, and I suddenly feel like such an asshole about everything. I assumed she got turned off by my scars, when in reality, she was probably dealing with her own demons.
And I was too self-absorbed to realize it.
The more I scroll, the more I realize how much I don’t know about my wife. There are pictures of her in Los Angeles two years ago. Pictures of her with her arm around another man, which makes me irrationally jealous. Pictures of what I can only assume was her apartment in London, because I recognize the horrid, crazy patterns of that designer she loves—the same one who is now all over our living quarters.
Glancing at the wall separating our bedrooms, I make an executive decision. Two decisions, actually—to wear the one pair of sweatpants that I own, and to go knock on her bedroom door to ask her about her life.
She was right last week. We need to be friends if we’re going to convince people that we’re in love. That doesn’t just include the physicality of being with someone. It’s knowing their favorite color, food, place. It’s knowing their dating history. It’s knowing more about the person she loved more than anyone in the world.
And I don’t really know my wife at all.
