Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
AMELIE
“Morning, Mrs. Cavendish.” Deena, our charge nurse, handed me a patient file without looking up from her computer.
I blinked. “Sorry?”
She looked up. “It’s the H&P file Dr. Nash requested.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Took the file that the on-call doctor had requested without a word.
She called me Mrs. Cavendish, I was almost certain. Deena had been calling me Amelie since the day I started. She had never called me anything else. How would she even know that my name had been legally changed to Amelie Cavendish?
Perhaps I misheard.
I walked away, not wanting to bring attention to the matter.
The second time it happened, I was certain of what I’d heard. It was notable because Christian from radiology barely spoke to anyone before ten. He flagged me down at the supply cart. “Mrs. Cavendish, Dr. Kwon wants to see you at noon.”
I stared at him. “Christian, you know my name.”
“I do,” he agreed, in the tone of a man who had been specifically instructed to use a different one.
“Then why are you calling me—”
“Noon,” he repeated pleasantly and walked away.
By the third Mrs. Cavendish—from Lin, the sweetest woman on the floor—I stopped pretending I didn’t know what was happening.
Kai.
Obviously, he was behind it. It was stupid to think he would just let the name change thing go.
I stood in the corridor for a moment and breathed through my nose before I did something drastic. How had he convinced everyone at the hospital to call me Mrs. Cavendish? It was a special kind of audacious.
Things had actually been okay with Kai recently. We had a surprisingly lovely weekend with the kids. The five of us made breakfast together. Kai made pancakes while Jamie and August set the table. Bella and I squeezed a dozen oranges with the kind of urgency that children bring to any messy task.
Later, we went to the amusement park. The kids were excited and barely reacted when I broke the dreaded news—their brother had left early and wouldn’t be joining us.
At the very least, I thought Bella, who’d always been particularly attached to her big brother, would be inconsolable.
But she was busy dragging Kai to every ride, something he dutifully obliged.
He had blended into our family so seamlessly that sometimes I wondered if we were merely trying to reenact a memory that none of us actually had.
The apex of the drama came when Bella overestimated her tolerance for cotton candy and vomited blue and pink all over the ride operator’s Crocs.
Kai handled it like he’d been training for this his entire life, gently wiping her face and paying the operator handsomely for his troubles.
Kai was so gracious that by the end, the ride operator was the one apologizing to him.
No one was immune to his charm. Not even me.
My heart fluttered when he bought Bella a ginger ale and sat with her on the shaded curb until she felt better.
The hands-on approach with the children had left me in disbelief.
Not once had Kai shirked his responsibilities to his staff or the nanny, and they weren’t even his brothers and sister.
How could this be the same megalomaniac tech zillionaire who propositioned me with a twisted relationship?
I had watched him carefully, waiting for an arrogant note in his voice or the glancing blow that would knock the moment off-balance.
But it never came. He had embraced ordinary life and the family man role so wholeheartedly that I forgot he could make the world dance to his tune.
Today was my much-needed reality check. Kai dropped the kids off at school, then drove me to work.
On the way, he stopped at a coffee house, left the car running, and ran in for his caffeine fix.
A moment later, he had returned with a cup in each hand, a coffee for him, and an almond chai latte for me.
When he reached across the center console to give me the cup, his hand brushed mine.
The touch was incidental, yet it lingered on my skin for the rest of the drive.
“Have a good day, Princess,” he had said before kissing me.
For the first time, I hadn’t rebuffed his advances.
Everything in the last few days had been joyous. Kai no longer felt like my enemy but rather a friend. A partner. Why would he do something so manipulative to piss me off?
Midday through my shift, I caught Ricky coming out of the elevators. I’d been meaning to apologize to him ever since Kai scared the shit out of him for his harmless flirtations.
“Hi, Ricky.” I raised my hand to wave.
He visibly stiffened and turned on his heel. I frowned.
“Hey, Ricky. Wait up.”
He only sped up in the opposite direction. I rushed after him as orderlies and patients stared in our direction. I barely caught the back of his scrubs. He didn’t turn around, his gaze fixed straight ahead.
“What’s wrong?” Why wouldn’t he make eye contact?
“I can’t look at you,” he said tersely.
“Excuse me?”
“I can’t look at you. Sorry, Ame—” He paused. “Sorry, Mrs. Cavendish.”
What the hell? “What are you talking about?”
“Your husband… Mr. Cavendish paid me twenty thousand dollars to never look at you again.” A beat before he added, “Sorry, Amel—Mrs. Cavendish. You know the situation with my mom. I really need the money.”
My hold on his scrubs dropped. I was so taken aback that I barely noticed when he sprinted across the hall, putting as much distance between us as possible.
Ricky could never look me in the face. We worked together. What the hell? Kai was a lunatic.
Just when I thought I couldn’t be angrier, Jo broke the true bad news during the second half of my shift. She was waiting for me by the reception with the expression of someone trying very hard not to look thrilled. “Morning, Mrs. Cavendish.” She winked.
I closed my eyes. “Not you, too.”
“What was that, Mrs. Cavendish?”
“I swear to God, Jo.”
She pressed her lips together. A smile broke through anyway.
“How much did Kai pay you to make you call me that?” I asked ruefully.
“Kai didn’t pay me anything. But a few of his assistants stopped by and distributed envelopes containing a thousand dollars to the hospital staff. They merely advised us of your name change.”
Asshole! I hated how he used money to control everyone in my life. “What did they say?”
“A thousand-dollar courtesy payment will be made to each staff member of this hospital,” she imitated. “It’s a goodwill gesture for anyone who refers to Amelie as Mrs. Cavendish.”
Courtesy payment.
He paid my colleagues a thousand dollars each to call me by his last name. Not even to do anything useful. Just to say two words. Mrs. Cavendish. A thousand dollars. Per person. I did a quick calculation of the nursing staff alone and felt slightly faint.
“Are you really going to call me Mrs. Cavendish for a thousand dollars?”
“I’m going to call you Mrs. Cavendish for free because I really like your husband,” she said earnestly. “The thousand dollars was a bonus.”
My grim expression sobered her excitement.
The humor bled out of her words. “I don’t get it. Why have you been going by Amelie Noble if it isn’t your name? What’s so bad about being Mrs. Cavendish?”
It was bad because I owed an explanation to those who knew Stefan Noble to be my husband. At least Jo had never met Stefan and had mistaken Kai for the nameless husband I had occasionally referred to. What was I supposed to do about those who knew? What must they think of me?
“I just never got around to changing my last name,” I said carefully.
“There’s more at play here if your husband felt the need to pay people to call you by your married name.” She scrutinized me in a way that made me itch beneath my skin. “Did you think we’d ask for money if we found out you married the richest man in town?”
“Of course not.”
“Then I wished you trusted us enough to tell us the truth. We’re not money-hungry, gold diggers, you know?”
But I was. I stood there, shame curdling my stomach. “I-I didn’t want you guys to look at me differently for marrying him.”
“Look at you differently? If anything, I respect you more for working, even though you don’t need the money. Personally, I would have married this man solely based on his body.” Jo held up a magazine—Darster Living. “Your husband’s so hot.”
I stared, dumbstruck, at the glossy, self-congratulatory local magazine that covered Kai’s life with breathless reverence and zero journalistic scrutiny. I had seen it in waiting rooms and thought nothing of it.
I thought something of it now.
The headline read: The Prince of Darster and His Wife: Inside Kai Cavendish’s Private Life.
“Your man is featured in this thing every month. How did you even think you’d hide being married to him? They literally call him the Prince of Darster.” Jo tried but couldn’t tamp down the excitement in her voice. “Your wedding pictures are so beautiful!” she babbled.
I snatched the magazine out of her hands and opened the article. Beneath a photo, the caption read: Kai and Amelie Cavendish on their wedding day.
“W-when did—”
“It was published yesterday. We were all confused, so count your blessings that his assistants stopped by today to set us straight.”
Suddenly, I felt very tired. I didn’t have the energy to explain my complicated life to Jo. I walked away with the magazine in hand, letting her believe that I didn’t tell anyone about Kai because being married to the richest man in town made you a target.
I marched to the hospital parking lot and read the entire article on a shaded bench.
My name appeared four times. Kai’s name was smeared across the article twenty-eight times.
No mention of Stefan Noble. Four pages of copy that erased my other marriage entirely.
How would Stefan feel about his wife being publicly claimed by another man in print?
I imagined it would only add to our growing rift.