Sweet Romance11 min read
We signed papers, then he gave me a ring and a secret
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I have liked him since I was small.
"I thought I was dreaming," I said once, to the empty window. "You left for college like a rocket."
"You always were dramatic," my own voice answered back, and I laughed alone.
When I met him again as my company's new boss, his face had settled into a different map—sharp, unreadable, careful. He carried a child like he carried the world: with a strange tenderness I had never seen in the boy's father pictures.
"I've wanted this for years," I whispered under my breath when I signed the papers the first time.
He didn't ask for explanations. He gave terms.
"Twenty thousand a month," he said, neutral. "You look after Felix on weekdays. Don't tell anyone here. No interference."
"Why me?" I asked, furious and embarrassed at once.
"You look... grounded," he replied.
"Grounded?" I repeated, as if he had spat an insult.
A moment later my phone chimed. "Transfer received: $20,000." I swallowed and said, "Fine."
"Sign here," he said. "One year."
"Why is this so fast?"
"Because I don't like drama."
He left the city the morning after we registered. He left me the keys to a house with floor-to-ceiling windows and a small note: "Choose whichever you like." He said it like instructions, like a man who had learned to set boundaries as walls.
On my first day as Felix's official guardian, the boy looked at me with all of five years' worth of suspicion and declared, "You're not my mom."
"That's okay," I said, smiling at the teacher. "I'll learn."
"You'll learn to leave," the boy added, and shoved my hand away when I reached out.
I wanted to be that person who could handle it all. I wanted to be brave.
Days passed like checklists. "Pick him up." "Do homework." "Report to me at night." Our marriage was a contract and a clock. The house had his ordered silence; my life had its small, stubborn noises: the hiss of the kettle, Felix's cartoons, the rustle of paper when I graded homework.
On the phone that first week he said, "Don't mind him. He tests people."
"Who wouldn't?" I answered.
"You're different."
"You mean I don't run away?"
"You mean you don't look away."
That small compliment was a seed.
At work, women whispered. "New boss is gorgeous." "He has a kid." "Isn't that tragic?" No one knew I had his key in my bag.
Once, in the mall garage, I saw him in his car with a girl leaning on his shoulder. I froze. She kissed him, and I thought I would drown.
"Delete my number," he said to the girl in the car. "Don't be pathetic."
The girl cried and left. I stepped into the elevator, saw his face in the glass, and he looked at me like a question. Then he left.
"Is he cruel?" my friend asked later.
"He's pragmatic," I said.
Pragmatic was a carried word. It fit him. It didn't hurt like "cold."
Felix was a judge who never hesitated. He watched my every move like an exam proctor. He had moments when tears came from nowhere—"I don't have a mom," he sobbed one afternoon; "she's gone."
I held him and promised small things, because big promises weren't mine to make. Later, he placed a photograph in front of me—folded at the corner, soft at the edges. The woman in it looked impossibly familiar.
"That's my mother," he said, proud and precise. "She looks much better than you."
The woman in the photograph was Alivia Mustafa; she looked like a glossy magazine photograph. I had never met her. My heart stopped because, impossibly, that woman looked like me.
"She can't be—" I began.
"She is," said Felix, chewing his lip. "She is my mother."
My world tilted.
I pulled a thousand possible threads in my brain: how could my sister exist without me? how could she be a face I resembled? why was she the one who had a life so far from the one I knew?
At home, in the soft half-light, he watched me.
"You look like her," he said once, softly. "Do you know her?"
"No," I said. "I think—she's my sister."
For a while we lived in a strange limbo where our days were practical and our nights raw.
"Do you ever miss being ordinary?" he asked once, while helping Felix set up a Lego car.
"Ordinary is where I learned to be brave," I answered.
He smiled like a secret told. "Then you belong to ordinary and extraordinary."
There were afternoons when he would appear at the office and sit in the corner of our weekly meeting like a storm holding its breath. People saw him as a thunderhead. But then he became mine—small gifts, careful texts, the way he would check my shoes at the end of a long day.
"Why are you like this?" I asked him one rainy night when he sat in the doorway with a medical kit and bandaged my cheek after a fight at the school yard.
"Because you got hurt," he answered. "I can't stand it."
He treated wounds with tenderness that made me dizzy. He spoke less with romantic proclamations than with steady actions. "Tell me if anything hurts," he would say. "I will come."
The truth about Alivia unfolded slowly. One weekend he took me to a house in the countryside, an older couple waiting with stitched hands and warm tea. "They are my parents," he said. "They never met you."
He introduced me to Canon Cunningham—stern, clever, and softer than his sternness when he smiled at Felix. The old woman, who couldn't see well, pressed a worn embroidery into my palm.
"My sister made this for my son once," she said. "She was planning to give it as a wedding gift."
"Who?" I asked.
"Bryant's girl," Canon said.
My chest broke in a good and bad way. The embroidery was years old. The old woman told a story of a man named Bryant Ramos, his death in a car accident years before, and of a young man who had returned and taken the child under his wing. He had raised Felix as his own when the child's mother—Alivia—left or refused to give herself to the life of a small boy and a quieter house.
"You forgave him for what?" I asked Caspian later. "Why stay and raise a child that was not yours?"
"Because it was right," he said. "Because a child needs someone to be the shore."
The more I listened, the more I felt my old small self tumble into place—always watching him under the wisteria-tree, the boy who had stood guard, the shadow that became a light. He had carried guilt and memory like a mantle. He never told me in tidy phrases. He only showed up in the nights I needed him.
"Stay," he said one night. "I asked your parents first. They didn't come."
I had no parents. But I had a mother who drank and a small house of brittle memories. A wedding sounded like a bright place to be unafraid.
The day we were to sign our promise in public, everything snapped into a new angle.
"You want everyone to know now?" I asked. "You want to invite them?"
He smiled and handed me the invitations with one line on the top: "A small wedding. No gifts."
"Are you mad?" I asked, half-laughing.
"A little," he said. "Do you trust me?"
"To make a spectacle?" I laughed.
He kissed my temple and answered, "To make a home."
The wedding was set in a small hall with light like paper. Friends came. Colleagues came. Canon Cunningham stood at the side, a man who watched every step like someone who had seen too many storms.
Halfway through the ceremony, a voice cut through the soft music like a blade.
"You really think you can make me look good?" A woman in a designer coat stood in the back. "You think you can just sweep in with your pretty girl and pretend nothing happened?"
Alivia Mustafa.
She had flown in and walked like someone who owned every room she crossed. Her voice ricocheted.
"Alivia," Caspian said, and something in his face turned sharp as glass.
"How dare you call her my wife," she said, with the cruel calm of someone who expected people to bend.
"Sit down," Canon said, quietly. "This is not the place."
"I will not sit." Alivia's voice rose. "You stole my child! You are a thief!"
The room froze. Conversations died. Someone gasped.
"She lied to you," I heard one guest whisper. "She just wants money."
Alivia smiled like that proved something. "This is my son," she declared. "I was never allowed—"
"You are not his mother," Felix shouted from my side, small voice stabbing the room. "I have a mother, but she left."
Tension built like a storm. Alivia stepped forward, hands theatrical. "You all think I'm asking for money," she said. "No. I want what is mine. I want my boy back. You built a life with him and lied!"
She turned to me and spat, "Do you know what it means to be a second wife? To be a shadow?"
"Enough." Caspian's voice filled the hall. He looked at her like someone looking at an unsolved puzzle. "Alivia, do you want me to show everyone how you lived the last five years?"
The hall waited like a held breath.
"Yes," Alivia said, proud. "Show the truth. Show them I was the mother."
Caspian nodded once. "Lawyer, the table."
A man in a gray suit moved, and Canon's fingers closed around my hand so tightly my knuckles blurred. "Be calm," he mouthed.
Caspian stood where light touched his shoulders and spoke, "Everyone here has phones. I will let the truth reach them at once."
He opened his phone and tapped. A projector on the wall blinked—images, messages, bank transfers, text threads—all the paper and pixels of a life.
"These are transfers," he said. "From Alivia to a series of shell accounts. These are bookings she took of hotels—rooms with men. These are texts with threats and bribes. This is the adoption lawyer's email where she signed away care for a fee, then later tried to retract because some other man offered more."
"You're lying!" Alivia's voice cracked. For a moment she was not the woman in the coat but a frightened animal. "You can't—"
"She sold an interview to a tabloid last month, telling a false story about our family, demanding money to stay quiet," Caspian said. "She tried to blackmail offices, to force me to send funds for 'the child's care', while keeping the child away for weeks at a time."
Someone in the back muttered, "This is horrible."
"Look at the timestamps," Caspian continued. "Here, counsel—show them the messages where she threatened to claim this child was ill if demands weren't met."
The screen showed months of evidence like rain: recordings of calls, photographs of Alivia at parties the same days she claimed to be at the hospital, receipts for designer items paired with empty apartments where she pretended to live with Felix.
Alivia's face fell. The color drained. She went through the motions of denial.
"It's photoshopped!" she cried.
"Cameras at the kindergarten recorded her behaviors," Canon said, his voice steady as an axe. "The school reported manipulation. We called lawyers. You refused calls. You accepted money and ran."
The room was loud: whispers, someone saying "Oh my God," the click of phone cameras. I watched the crowd like a wave: curiosity, anger, then disgust.
Alivia's eyes darted from face to face. "You're lying!" she screamed. "You used me. You used the story."
A woman in the corner, a journalist, began recording. People moved closer. The air smelled like spilled wine and the metallic of truth.
"Do you want people to hear the call you made last month?" Caspian asked.
The woman with the recorder nodded. "Yes."
They played a voice message. A cold voice—the same Alivia—demanded money, threatened to ruin careers.
The crowd changed. Murmurs turned to accusations. Phones rose, videos were made. People pushed forward like a tide. "Shame!" someone shouted. "Disgrace!" called another.
Alivia's expression shifted quickly: arrogance, then confusion, then panic. She tried to smear colors on the canvas that was falling apart.
"It's not true!" she wailed. "I loved him—"
"Love does not equal abandonment, Ms. Mustafa," Canon said. "You left, you took opportunities, you took money, and you took headlines."
"You are a coward," she sobbed, now small and pleading. "I needed help. No one helped me."
"Help the child," Caspian said quietly. "But not like this. You traded love for attention."
Her reaction moved like theater: from haughty to stunned, from denial to pleading. She reached for me—"Don't take him!"—then realized, with a flaring of panic, that people had already filmed her confession and the evidence. "I didn't—it's not—"
"Felix has a family who loves him," I said, my voice not mine but something steady. "He is safe."
The crowd shifted. Some applauded. Others took photos. Someone laughed, sharp.
Alivia began to pace. "You think you are all judges," she said, voice shrill. "You don't know anything."
"Oh, we know enough," a woman in the third row said, and the murmurs grew. "We know people who play with children's lives."
Alivia's face finally broke. She sank onto a chair. For the first time, she didn't demand to be pretty. She was undone.
"Please," she whispered. "Please—"
"Apologize," Canon said. "Say it now."
Alivia looked at him like a savage thing uncertain of commands. She put her hands together and begged, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Forgive me."
But the room wouldn't accept simple words as currency. The crowd wanted to watch permission be taken away. She had to pay with consequences.
"We will release these recordings," Caspian said. "We will send them to the publications you threatened, and we will ensure the court sees your pattern. We will also offer you supervised visitation if you want to re-enter Felix's life honestly."
"Supervised?" she cried.
"We will require therapy. We will require that you stop monetizing the child's story," he said. "This is not punishment for you alone; this is protection for Felix."
She broke. She begged, she denied, she accused, and finally, she collapsed in shame. Cameras clicked. People whispered. Someone posted a video and it went viral in the hour. Social media called it the "wedding reveal." The guests, once my company's jovial group, lined up to sign the petition Caspian handed to his lawyer: "Protect the child. No exploitation."
Alivia's reaction changed: first haughtiness, then disbelief, then rage, then supplication, finally collapse. The room watched as every mask fell.
When it was over she was left trembling, a woman unmade in public, her dignity stripped not by gossip but by record. She tried to reach out to people—"You don't understand"—but the crowd, phones out and faces drawn, only recorded.
A man laughed in the back and said, "Poetic justice."
Others looked away.
Felix hid behind my dress and whispered, "Is she okay?"
"She's going to get help," I said, because it was true. "She will. We won't leave her to the streets, but we won't let her burn the boy's life for headlines."
Alivia wept. People took photos. The priest left the aisle for a moment, stunned. Canon went to my side and squeezed my hand.
"That was necessary," he said. "Sometimes the world needs to see the truth before it will stop honoring lies."
I didn't feel triumphant. I felt drained and oddly empty. The public spectacle had satisfied a hunger for justice but left a strange silence in my chest.
After the wedding, as we stood under a wisteria tree planted outside the hall—its petals falling like confetti—Caspian put a ring on my finger. "No refunds," he joked.
"I didn't bring any," I answered.
He pulled me close and kissed me. "You used to watch me under this tree," he whispered. "You have never known how much I wanted to be brave enough to keep you."
"I used to wait under this tree," I said. "I thought I would never be noticed."
"Now you are noticed by me," he said.
"Do you love me because I'm like someone else?" I asked him that night, punishing him with an old suspicion.
"No," he said, fluent in the language of simple truths. "I love you because you stayed."
That was the day my ordinary life and his extraordinary one braided into one. The wisteria tree had been a witness for years; now it bloomed for us.
We kept promises like little bricks: he never left without telling me. He never refused a school play. He never asked me to be anything other than myself.
"Promise?" I asked him sometimes, like a child testing weather.
"Always as much as you need," he'd answer, and hold me.
At times the world was cruel, but in the small quiet of our kitchen, with Felix slurping soup and Canon making terrible puns, I felt like I had finally landed somewhere soft.
We built a life out of discipline and small mercies.
"And the tattoo?" he asked one night, pointing at the small wisteria tattoo at the base of my neck, something I had hidden for years.
"I got it for the courage," I said.
He laughed. "It suits you."
When the dust settled and the journalists had their stories, Alivia's name traveled across feeds with condemnation. She tried to rebuild but had to take long tests, therapy, and make reparation. She stood in courtrooms and interviews and finally, after months, apologized to Felix on a recorded call, supervised, honest. People kept watching and the world kept turning.
My mother showed up once at midnight, drunk and small, and apologized in a way only she could—she hit me with a broom and then hugged me like a child. I forgave her again.
"Why did you forgive her?" my husband asked the morning after.
"Because I was once small and broken too," I replied. "Forgiveness is not for her. It's for me."
Felix grew secure. He began to call me "Aunt Jay" at kindergarten and then "Mom" at night when the dark monsters came. He learned to sleep with a stuffed bear. He learned to fight alone sometimes and to ask for help sometimes.
One evening, as the sun cast long shadows through our big windows, I looked at Caspian, at the man who once asked me to sign a paper and now gave me everything I hadn't dared ask.
"Do you remember how you said you wouldn't interfere?" I teased.
He smiled, "I lied."
I laughed and then leaned into his warmth. The wisteria petals sat on the sill like tiny promises. The tattoo at my neck ached like a sweet memory.
"I used to love someone who didn't know me existed," I said, soft.
"Now you have the man who went looking," he answered.
We kissed, and the house—full of dishes, toys, and small chaos—felt like the only kingdom.
The End
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