Chapter 1 — The Girl at the Window

My honeymoon hadn’t even taken off when I saw a little girl with my exact eyes sitting on the lap of the woman my family had forced me to forget.

I had married Isabela Fairfax the night before — the perfect daughter for a man carrying the Marchand name.

The wedding had been held at my family’s estate in Greenwich, Connecticut, filled with white roses and high-ranking politicians and wealthy executives raising champagne toasts, and my father smiling like a man who had just closed the deal of his life.

Maybe he had.

By the next morning, Isabela and I were sitting in the VIP lounge at the airport, waiting for our flight to Cabo — an oceanfront villa her family had gifted us, a week of catered breakfasts, and the promise of publicity photos proving that two powerful dynasties could unite without a single crack showing.

Chapter 2 — Isabela

Isabela wore an off-white linen suit, designer sunglasses resting in her hair, a diamond ring shining like a brand-new promise.

She was polite, elegant, reserved — precisely the kind of woman my father had spent my whole life insisting I choose.

I did not dislike her.

That was the strange, sad truth of it.

She was kind in a careful way, and clever, and as trapped by her family’s expectations as I was by mine, though neither of us had ever quite said so out loud.

We had been assembled, the two of us, like the terms of a contract.

And then I looked across the lounge, and the contract stopped mattering.