Sweet Romance19 min read
Married for Three Months — The Husband Who Built the House
ButterPicks15 views
I never expected marriage to be a costume I could take off and on. I thought it would be ordinary, honest, a small rebellion against my past. I married fast — a lightning decision three months ago — because I wanted clean lines and no mess. I thought it would be simple.
"Tell me again why we're married?" I asked once, in the dim light of our tiny kitchen.
Axel Fernandes looked up from the plate he was wiping. His face held the kind of quiet that made people believe he owned nothing but time. "Because you wanted to stop being lonely," he said, precise and low. "Because you asked."
That had felt like a fragile, private truth we could both hold. Now, three months in, a neighbor joked and everything changed.
"Miss Amira," the property manager said, small-town cheer in her voice and a secret behind it, "you can't keep pets here. This whole building — everyone says — belongs to you and your husband."
I laughed at first.
"Excuse me?" I answered too loudly, because laughter is easier than admitting fear.
She smiled, conspiratorial. "Oh, honey. Don't be coy. The whole block? Yours. Everyone knows."
I walked home like I was moving underwater. The apartment was the same: a narrow line of light over the sink, a pot of stew on the stove, a dish towel thrown where I'd thrown it. I was twenty-three, a junior surgeon with a modest salary. My father had been the kind of man who believed in earning a living honestly; I had learned to scrub for every cent. There was no way this building could be mine.
Axel came home before the stew arrived. He stepped close behind me while I dried my hands, the motion so casual I didn't think about it.
"You're hugging the table," he said, voice a measured bass.
He pressed his palms to my waist and laughed softly. "This table's too weak. We'll get a new one."
"You think about table strength before you think about anything else," I teased, though my mouth had a dry edge. I couldn't stop wondering why the property manager had said what she said. Who would say that about me?
"Get whatever cat you like," Axel told me, unbothered. "You like ragdolls?"
"Ragdolls cost a fortune. Ten, twenty thousand." I said the number and it sounded ridiculous in my own head.
He put a card on the table. "This should be enough."
I stared at the card as if it might bite. "What do you do for work?" I asked, finally. The question had been a private one, but something in me had shifted. The property manager's joke had been a stone thrown into my small life, and the ripples were growing.
Axel looked at me as if I had said something sweet. "You asked me before. Why ask now?"
"Because," I swallowed, "the property manager said she thought my husband owned the block."
Axel didn't even blink. He just finished his stew, cleared the plates, and pulled me to the couch to watch a show I liked. He didn't explain. He didn't flinch.
That silence pushed me. I traced the stiff line of his jaw as he reclined and asked in a softer voice, "What if I asked again? What if I want to know what you really do?"
He let me scratch the faint stubble on his chin. "Amira." His voice changed like an instrument that had been tuned. "I like to be known when I want to be known."
Then his mouth kissed my hand. It felt real and ordinary and made the suspicion in my chest dissolve into a hum.
Morning came and his side of the bed was empty. Red marks, love bites, littered my neck. I cursed under my breath and reached for concealer, a surgeon's quick fix for a non-medical problem.
At the hospital I met Travis Blankenship again for the first time since the breakup. He stood at my office doorway, his tailored coat like a protective armor. We had been five and seventeen the first time we noticed each other. He had been sharp, brilliant, endlessly ambitious — the sort of man who accepted praise as oxygen. Our five-year history had given me almost everything a girl could want and then taken it away when he traded loyalty for better prospects.
"Allergic?" Travis said when he saw me, with a casualness that still made me bristle. He carried the air of someone used to things bending to his plan.
"Something like that," I replied. "Do you need me?"
He sat at his desk, the gestures of command too practiced. "This office," he said suddenly, "you won't be using it much longer."
"Why?" I asked, automatically defensive.
"Hospital arrangement. You're moving downstairs. Logistics." He tapped his wrist, indifferent.
I thought about the mark on my throat, about the property manager, about the card Axel had slid toward me the night before. "You can't decide where my office is."
"It's hospital policy," he said with the smile of a man who had friends in places that mattered. "Less stress for you."
"Don't call me 'Lu lu' in public anymore," I interrupted sharply. "We're not that close."
He paused. "You asked me to look after Le Ning. I did."
"Le Ning is not your concern," I said. Then, because I couldn't bite the words out of my head, I added, "You'll stop using personal favors as management tools."
He stood up to leave. At the door he glanced at the marks on my neck and said in an odd tone, "Take your antihistamines."
I wanted to laugh. "It's not an allergy."
He walked away like he had. If he had seen the truth, he didn't show it. That was the first time I realized some men imagine themselves more generous than they are.
Work that afternoon felt like thin ice. I finished a long operation—eight hours that had felt like thirty—and went to the small staff bathroom to freshen. Two nurses were whispering near the sink when I came out.
"Amira's office was given to Le Ning," one said, meaning it to sting.
"Travis arranged it," the other added. "Doctor gets the perks. Girl's gotta know how to play the game."
I left without speaking. On the corridor, a sleek silver car rolled to a stop and a man I only knew from a shadow of memory leaned out the window. His face looked carved: the sort of face that magazine photographers might envy. His voice from the car sounded low and careful.
"Get in," he said simply.
The man was Axel Fernandes. He opened the door, offered an easy smile. "We're married," he told me later with a simple shrug when I asked why he had intervened. "So I help my wife."
I hesitated. "But your car—" I started.
"Borrowed," he said. "Ryder let me take it."
Ryder Roth, Axel's boss and a public figure of wealth and charm, was someone I had met only in passing. Axel's casualness with these names pinched something inside me. That night the staff whispered. Le Ning had a promotion and a glow, and the hospital's public face began to tilt. Who we had been seemed less important than who we seemed to be.
On a bright Monday I opened Axel's social feed on a whim. He rarely posted. There he was, at his company's penthouse, a board presentation on the screen, and my message popped up on his phone and — inexplicably — on the projection behind him. It read in my cheeky tone:
"You know how hard it is to hide those marks. If you leave more, I won't kiss you."
There was silence in the room.
Ryder turned, eyes flicking from the screen to Axel. "So this is your 'wife'?" he asked later, with sharp interest and a smile that was half praise and half a challenge.
Axel laughed a small sound, neither humble nor boastful. "She's mine," he said, and then, when I phoned him later and teased, he softened. "Come get me after work." He had a way of being both distant and protective that made me oddly... safe.
Ryder was flamboyant and teasing. At dinner he told me ridiculous stories to make me laugh — and they worked. Axel sat back and let me talk; he loved how I talked, apparently. When the night cooled and the streetlights lit the city's long bones, we drove home on borrowed power, and I shoved the doubt into the back of my mind like a deflated balloon.
The next day, my old life bled back into the ward. A boy—son of a powerful man—went under anesthesia for an appendectomy and spiked a dangerous fever. The team that had prepped the OR looked pale. "High heat," someone announced. "40.5°C."
"Call the senior," a nurse said.
I ran because there's nothing romantic about running when you're a surgeon. The boy's chest heaved, monitors screaming; family members cried. People looked toward us like us doctors were heroes or villains, depending on who you asked.
"Who was on this case?" I demanded.
"Le Ning," someone said. "She was supposed to be lead."
I felt the old familiar shape of anger. Le Ning had been a ward friend once: fragile, pleading, eager for the right look or the right favor. That afternoon she looked like an actress who had finally been cast in the part she'd wanted.
"Get me anesthesia notes," I snapped, slipping on gloves.
I took the case. When you are in the OR, you do not gossip. You do not think about who gets the praise. You think about the breathing, the temperature, the blood. We did what we could. I found the horrific truth through the rhythm of my fingers and the way the lines of life had been arranged: malignant hyperthermia. It is a rare, brutal reaction to certain anesthetics. The clock becomes your enemy.
"Call the pharmacy. Dantrium now," I ordered. "Full cooling measures. Open lines now!"
The room moved like a single animal in danger. The patient's mother sank into me with everything she had. The boy's temperature dropped slowly. The way people looked at me afterward was different. For a short, intense moment, my work was the only thing that mattered.
Afterwards, on the hospital website, an interview aired. It was edited and pretty; Le Ning's voice spoke with bright cadence and the footage included clips that were not, strictly speaking, hers. People are clever with cameras. She was charming and the piece called her "hero."
I felt like something porous had been stitched into me. I wrote a factual note, with time stamps, medication names — a surgeon's ledger of the truth — and sent it to the anesthesiologist who had worked that night. He promised to help. I posted a small factual clip explaining malignant hyperthermia and how Dantrium saved the child. My post vanished like a soap bubble when the hospital servers began to glitch.
Within hours, the hospital's posts were spammed. A viral thread titled "Who Saved the Boy?" began to trend on forums. Someone had posted a grainy clip from the dinner where Le Ning and the businessman Gerard Gerard sat close, and a photo of me being kissed by Axel when we'd left the property manager behind — a photo Axel would never have wanted posted, except that the online world doesn't ask for permission.
"The hospital site is down," Connor Olivier, my young assistant, said coolly. Connor was brilliant in a still, careful way, the kind of intern who never sought the limelight and yet saw everything. "They can't delete it. Someone's pulling strings."
They were pulling at the soft places in me. I felt my face harden like a tool. I had thought this would be about me and a handsome, quiet husband and a steady, small life. Now the game was loud and public.
"Will you let them steal this?" Axel asked when we met that evening at our door. He had come straight from work; his face was slightly shadowed. "Do you want me to make a call?"
"No," I said before I could decide. My voice sounded foreign. "I can do it."
"You don't have to fight alone," he said gently.
"I'm going to fight. I am a doctor. I will say what happened."
Axel looked at me with a softness that made the hollow in my chest ache. "I like to watch you when you fight," he said. "But not for that reason. For this: you stand. I like that."
The campaign online grew crueler by the hour. Rumors about me visiting Axel at his company, about motives, about being opportunistic, flew across feeds. Threads suggested I had married for money. Someone posted a screenshot of my message to Axel about the kiss during his company presentation — the one that had jutted into a sea of business slides. It was mocking. It was intimate and embarrassing because it was mine.
The next day a news outlet published a dossier claiming that Axel had bought our entire building. The headline screamed: "Married to a Millionaire: The Surgeon's Confession." The comments were a chorus: some praising, some scolding. The seed had been planted — my private life had a price tag, and everyone wanted to weigh it.
I could have been defensive, could have run away. Instead, at noon, I walked into the hospital lobby. A press van idled outside with lights like stage eyes. Cameras, always shoes away from the truth, pressed forward.
"Amira Martin?" a reporter said. "Care to comment about the property allegations? About being married to Axel Fernandes?"
"I am a surgeon," I replied gently. "My concern is patients. If you want a story, talk to the staff."
"Why hide how rich your husband is?" another asked.
"Because my husband's wealth is none of the public's business," I said. "My work is not a prop."
That was when the tide turned. In the middle of the crowd, I saw Tracy — no, Alexandra Duncan — stride toward me. Alexandra had been my friend since junior college; she did not play at faintheartedness.
"Stand beside me," she whispered.
I let her guide me. We walked into the hospital auditorium where a charity gala for the pediatric wing had been planned months ago. The mayor, the board, a hundred people in glittering clothes — the exact kind of crowd that eats scandal for dessert — were assembled. It was simultaneously the best and the worst stage.
"Amira Martin," the event MC said, once our presence was noticed, "would you step up? We have a small demonstration on medical rescue that we'd love to show."
I took the mic, feeling the heat and cold in equal measure. "This won't be a show," I said. "This will be truth."
I told them what malignant hyperthermia was, about anesthesia, about Dantrium, about precise times and names. I explained that there had been confusion, and that medicine should be credited, not used as a lever for celebrity. I laid out the facts with surgical exactness.
"And to everyone here," I said finally, leaning my hands on the podium, "if you want honesty, you will not bury it under flashy interviews. The truth is not a diamond that must fit a gossip column's finger. It is heavy and depends on names. The boy's life depended on Dantrium; the team did the work. If you want to praise, praise the team."
There were murmurs. Someone yelled, "So who wrote that hospital post?"
"Ask the web host," someone added.
That's when the screen behind me flickered — and a feed started to play. It showed a private dinner footage: Gerard Gerard, hands too familiar with Le Ning's, laughing in the glow of a flash. Another clip showed Travis Blankenship congratulating Le Ning on stage. Then, as if the world had scripted it, a new clip surfaced: Le Ning speaking in a news interview, saying "We all did it," implying she had been the hero of the OR.
I had to swallow against bile. Public opinion can be a crowd; a crowd needs a villain and a hero.
Travis sat stiff in the front row, eyes carefully attentive. Gerard's grin didn't reach his eyes. I saw the smile in the corner of Alexandra's mouth as she watched the screen.
"What are you doing?" I hissed to Alexandra after, as we walked down the steps together. "How can showing this help? It's the same shame."
"Watch," she said. "Turn to the other side."
I turned to see a different projection begin. Connor Olivier — quick, quiet — had been working on something for days. He had collected records, phone timestamps, the anesthesiologist's logs, the hospital's internal messaging. He had compiled them into a clear visual timeline. On the big screen, the truth unfurled in a way no gossip column could smear. There were timestamps of orders I had made. There were messages to the pharmacy requesting Dantrium and the clinical notes signed by hand. There were the hospital's own cameras showing me coordinating the cooling measures.
The auditorium was still. "We simply asked the hospital for the correct logs and the anesthesiologist for comment," Connor said into the microphone, voice steady. "We then cross-checked them with our own notes. The facts are here."
Connor handed the mic to me. I read, steady, and for anyone who wanted to see, the timeline left no room. When the screen showed the private dinner clip again — Gerard and Le Ning laughing — a quiet ripple of discomfort swept the room.
Travis rose, pale. "This is a breach," he said, voice flat. "You can't do this to people's private life."
"What's private when it affects a child's life?" I answered. The crowd shifted like flocks with uncertain leaders.
Then Connor displayed another file: a raw clip from the charity dinner that had been taken by a social media account — a version showing Le Ning in the OR, turned away from the boy, her hands off the patient at the most critical moment. The clip was grainy but the gestures were clear: someone else held the scalpel, someone else cooled the patient, but the edited news version had placed Le Ning's smiling face where the work had already been done.
"Manipulation for favor-seeking," Alexandra said. "When someone's career uses another's life as a prop, it is on us to object."
What happened next was not pretty. Gerard Gerard, the man whose influence had smoothed paths for many, flushed with anger at the implication. "This is slander," he said, loudly. "Who authorized this?"
"Those who care about truth," I replied, and the auditorium applauded like it had been rehearsed. But applause isn't always justice.
The board convened in private, and within hours there were consequences: the hospital suspended marketing which had aired the Le Ning piece; an internal audit commenced; the file that improperly credited a rescue to the wrong hands was flagged; the anesthesiologist who had been coerced into providing material statements was interviewed; the hospital PR person who had arranged the clip editing was put on leave pending investigation.
That was the administrative side. The social side was sharper.
Gerard's phone vibrated in the crowd. A stream of messages poured in. He stood, collected himself, and in a gesture of bluntness walked to the podium.
"Enough," he said loudly. "If anyone here believes that I have used influence unfairly, I stand wrong. I will accept the board's inquiry. I apologize to the family if they were misled by anything."
It sounded contrite. But the room had already shifted from curiosity to judgment. People are fickle. One powerful apology cannot buy back trust.
When the press storm moved to the square outside the hospital, the crowd around Gerard and Le Ning changed tone. They recorded video, pointed, and asked pointed questions. "Le Ning! Did you take credit that wasn't yours?" "Why did you speak to the press without all the facts?" Cameras circled. It was public. It was merciless.
Le Ning's face drained like paint left in the sun. For a long time she'd worn the look of the woman who was sure she had a place at the top. Now cameras framed her like a portrait of an opportunist.
She tried to laugh it off before reporters, hands fluttering. "People are misreading. I only told the story as I remembered it," she said, voice fraying. She reached for the symmetry she'd crafted between herself and the heady promise of success.
"Can you explain the timeline?" someone shouted.
Her mouth opened and closed. The board's inquiry leaked like water through a basket: text messages, email forwards, and a chain of favors that painted a picture. She had been told what to say; she had said it. In hospitals, there are quiet rules about who does what under pressure. In courtrooms of public opinion the rules get drowned out by the louder, easier narrative.
At the center of the square I watched Travis stand, hands folded like a boy trying to look like a man. He had leaned on influence before — he played the part of the reasonable man who gave jobs and shifted people's lives. Now the cameras cut closer to him. Emails surfaced where he'd nudged PR, where he'd asked to "highlight the hero." The public saw the notes and connected them to the edited footage.
"Isn't this manipulation?" a reporter asked him.
He tried to deny. "I only wanted to support a bright doctor," he said. "I wanted the department to be seen."
"Did you pressure the anesthesiologist to make statements?" a journalist pressed.
He swallowed. His face twitched. "No," he said finally. Then, in a breath, "Yes."
The crowd's reaction was not a whisper. Someone shouted for the press to see the hospital's audit board decision. A live stream lit up that same moment: the chairman announcing suspension and a formal complaint to the medical board. The man's arrogance lost its polish and cracked open.
It was not a courtroom, but it resembled one. People who had been allies in private had become witnesses in public. Travis's voice rose and fell; I could see the color dye out of him as colleagues recorded, shared, and circulated the evidence. He went from certain to incredulous to desperate. He insisted he was fair, then tried to rewrite the summary of messages. He attempted to play the martyr. Finally, in a choked, small voice, he apologized on camera.
It wasn't over. The public demanded someone to watch after trust had been broken. They wanted action: the board named a temporary review, PR was dissolved, Le Ning's promotion paused. The story was not just about a stolen credit; it was about a pattern of behavior built on favors and influence. People wanted the hospital to be a place for the ill, not for reputation-building.
The punishment was public and varied. Gerard lost face with his peers that night; his gestures toward power looked cheaper. Travis Blankenship faced the humiliation of an investigation; for a man who had wielded influence as a badge, watching press and colleagues look through his emails like papers at a yard sale was brutal. Le Ning — young, desperate, and wrong in choices — faced the sharpest fall: the promotion that had seemed guaranteed was shelved and the press called for the hospital to hold her accountable for the false impression given to the public. People had recorded her comments at the gala; on live cameras she had tried to explain, and the public watched the explanation unspool awkwardly.
They were stripped of the comfortable myth they had built. It was messy and satisfying in a way I had not expected. Watching Travis go from measured to pleading, watching Gerard realize prestige does not fully prevent judgment, was not cruelty. It was a form of balance. The world had a way of correcting itself when greed took performance over lives.
After the public spectacle, things calmed. The hospital took corrective action — formal statements, audits, and promises. The boy's family released a statement thanking the team and requesting no further intrusion. The press moved on to other presences because fame is a migrating species; still, the board's decisions lingered.
At home, Axel held me in the small quiet of our bedroom.
"I hate public storms," he said. "But I will stand with you when they come."
"I didn't want this," I said. "I just wanted to work."
"I know," he said. "You work like a doctor. You don't have the time for... theater." He kissed my hair, and the ache of tiredness eased.
After the scandal, the hospital's website returned slowly, this time with a clear statement: credit the team. A small post had my clinical note embedded; a surgeon's ledger was not poetry, but it was honest.
People came by the office offering support. Some of the younger nurses said they had seen my recording in the OR and were grateful I had taken the day. Connor kept to himself as always, but when I passed his desk his thin smile was enough to say 'we did right.'
Travis tried to speak to me afterward. I let him stand in the doorway, hands clasped like a supplicant.
"Amira," he said. "I... I'm sorry."
"Sorry?" I echoed. "You used a child's survival to build a narrative. You reshaped facts. You re-wrote history so that the applause pointed at who you wanted."
"It was a mistake," he said, voice brittle. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone."
"You meant it enough to do it." I answered simply.
He left, shut the door, and I felt a small closing of the last of that old life. It was not triumph. It was a cleanup. I had my work back in a cleaner light. But the most surprising thing after the public exposure was the consequence for Axel.
People now knew, or thought they knew, and my life had exposure. Axel... the world found out pieces of his life too. Someone wrote an exposé with the headline "The Quiet Man with a Private Empire." It claimed Axel Fernandes was not merely a programmer. It said he had shares in properties. It speculated, it stitched half-truths. It speculated I had married a man whose wealth dwarfed my savings.
Axel didn't shout about it. He pulled me close and said, "I like not telling everything. Secrets feel like islands. But tonight, if you want answers, ask and I will tell you."
We took a walk by the river. He told me he had not lied so much as chosen when to show his cards. He had a life with layers: a brilliant mind that could build systems, and a few quiet investments. He had friends like Ryder who were generous, and he borrowed cars when it suited his sense of playfulness. He liked to be private because some things, he said, felt fragile when they were handled by too many hands.
"Why keep so much to yourself?" I asked.
"Because I wanted you," he said simply. "I didn't want you to be with me because of things."
"Do you expect me to thank you for keeping me in ignorance?" I asked.
He shrugged, then reached across and squeezed my fingers. "No. I wanted time. I didn't want your choice to be about material things."
"I am not offended because you are rich," I said, and the truth settled like wet linen. "I'm offended because the world reduced us to a ledger too quickly. But maybe I did want, without knowing, a man who would be steady, not spectacular."
He smiled, and that small warmth made the whole street light up.
Weeks later the hospital finally held a small ceremony where the parents of the boy came to thank the team. The room was quiet, full of gratitude. The mother hugged me and whispered, "You saved my son." That meant more than any front page.
Outside, in the lobby, cameras still waited. People wanted to see the woman who had "won" a public war. Axel arrived, quiet, with Ryder and a few others, and stood back while I accepted the thanks.
On the way home Axel stopped and looked at me. "Amira," he said, "if the world ever makes a show and wants to shame someone again, you will call me."
"I will call," I promised.
At night, in the dark, I thought about how quickly people make stories from fragments. I thought about how easy it was to play hero and villain with someone else's life as a prop. I thought about the danger of letting people's opinions run your day like a train on tracks you didn't lay.
The months that followed were quieter. The hospital enforced stricter rules about interviews and credited staff. Le Ning was given a supervised review period. Gerard Gerard issued public statements and retreated from the limelight for a time. Travis's corner of influence faded as the board moved forward with more oversight. None of it felt like revenge; it felt like an overdue tidy-up.
Axel and I settled into a different rhythm. He would come back from work with the smallest gestures: an apple sliced neatly, a jacket warm from the dryer. I, who had once loved grand people and big plans, learned to value steadiness. He taught me how to be gently guarded; I taught him how to let someone in.
One evening in early spring we sat on our balcony. Connor texted with a silly meme. Ryder called about a new rooftop initiative. Alexandra brought us soup out of the blue.
"Do you regret the speed of our marriage?" he asked at one point, voice low and earnest.
"No," I said. "I regret only that it took me so long to trust."
He kissed me because he did that, and afterwards we sat quietly, the city unspooling below us. I felt safe enough to breathe out.
A few weeks later there was a new headline. Someone had leaked financials about the mixed-use building across the street — a hint that certain apartments were reserved, not for sale. Someone had tried to create a rumor that Axel had purchased the block to keep me isolated. It was petty, and it died a quiet death.
Sometimes I wonder — did I marry a secret empire or a man who hid pockets of his life for the pleasure of private things? The answer is both and neither. The truth is we have arguments about table legs and laundry detergent and small things that do not make newspapers. We go to bed and he wraps me like a careful hand around a fragile bird and I sleep.
Once, when the scandal was cooling, I stood in the hospital corridor and a junior nurse peered up at me shyly. "Doctor," she said, "I saw what you did with the boy. Thank you."
"Keep your eyes on your patients," I answered, and it was the truest praise I could accept.
Axel looked at me and smiled, his mouth a slow, private thing. "You saved a life and then saved the team," he said. "That is more than headlines."
It was. Headlines move. Life remains. We built something in that small, messy space.
Later, when people asked about the nightly kisses or the building rumors, I would sometimes laugh. "We married in three months," I'd say, "but the parts that matter take longer to learn. If people want a story, give them one: a surgeon and a quiet man living simply. That's true enough for now."
He wrapped an arm around me on the couch, warm and steady, a man who had once been accused of being more than he seemed and who still chose to be exactly the person he wished to be around me.
"Will you ever tell everyone the whole truth?" I asked once.
He looked at me like the answer belonged to both of us. "One day," he murmured. "But for now let's keep a little mystery. It's softer that way."
I smiled and kissed him back, which always seemed to fix more than any explanation.
And that was the ending that fit us: not loud, not theatrical, but honest in small ways. The kind that doesn't make good copy but makes a good life.
The End
— Thank you for reading —