Chapter 11
Miley
The scrambled eggs were getting cold.
I’d been up since six-thirty—an ungodly hour for me, and a record I’d set on purpose.
Christopher had said he leaves early, and if he left early, that meant I needed to be up earlier, and if I was going to be living in this man’s house for ninety days, the least I could do was make sure there was food on the table when he came downstairs.
It was what I did. I fed people. It was the one thing I’d always been good at, and right now—standing in a kitchen that wasn’t mine, in a house that wasn’t mine, married to a man who wasn’t mine who’d made it clear this was nothing more than a business deal—cooking was the only thing that still made sense.
So I’d made scrambled eggs. Sourdough toast, perfectly golden. Turkey bacon because I’d noticed the package in the fridge and guessed it was his preference. Fresh-squeezed orange juice because the man had an expensive high-quality juicer and someone should use it.
I’d set the dining table. Two places. Napkins folded. Juice poured.
And now I was sitting there, alone, watching the eggs go from fluffy to sad while the clock on the wall ticked past seven, then seven-fifteen, then seven-thirty.
He wasn’t coming down.
I waited five more minutes because I was stubborn. Then I stood, walked upstairs, and knocked on his bedroom door.
Nothing.
I knocked again. “Christopher?”
Silence.
I stood in the hallway and considered my options. He’d said he leaves early. It was seven-thirty. Could he already be gone?
Had I woken up at six-thirty, cooked an entire breakfast, set a table with folded napkins, and been stood up by a man who was already on his way to the office?
That would be exactly my luck. A perfect meal, prepared with care, for a man who wasn’t even in the building. My cooking career in miniature.
I should have walked away. I know I should have. But the door was right there and it wasn’t locked. I’d spent forty-five minutes on those eggs and if they were going to be eaten by nobody, I at least wanted to confirm that nobody was the intended audience.
I pushed the door open just a crack, enough to take a peek.
His bedroom was exactly what I’d expected and nothing like I’d imagined.
Minimal. Clean. Dark furniture, dark bedding, nothing on the walls.
It looked like a hotel room that someone checked into but never unpacked in.
No photos. No books on the nightstand. No signs of the man who lived here except a watch on the dresser and a jacket draped over a chair.
The bed was made. Not slept-in-and-then-made. Made. The pillows were perfectly placed, the duvet smooth and unwrinkled. It looked like nobody had touched it in days.
That was strange.
I closed the door with a soft click and turned to leave when I heard it.
A sound.
And then the door opened. Christopher walked out, except I could have sworn I’d looked at the whole room and he wasn’t in it.
He was shirtless.
My brain noted this and every single thought vanished from my head.
His hair was damp. His sweatpants sat low on his hips.
He was carrying a pillow under one arm, which was an odd thing to bring out of a bathroom.
But I didn’t have the bandwidth to process that detail because his shoulders were right there, his stomach just as impossible to ignore and the trail of dark hair below his navel far too distracting—and my eyes were not staying in their lane.
“What are you doing in my room?”
His voice was cold, snapping me back to reality.
“I didn’t see you,” I said. “I knocked and there was no answer. I just wanted to tell you breakfast is ready.”
“You’re not my real wife.” He said it flatly, like he was correcting a misunderstanding. “You don’t need to put in all that effort.”
The words struck in my chest and sat there like a stone. Not my real wife. All of it reduced to something that wasn’t required.
I nodded. “Understood.”
I turned and walked down the stairs, into the kitchen where the scrambled eggs were almost cold and the toast had gone from golden to room temperature. I stood there for a second. Then I picked up both plates, the juice, the toast, and carried everything outside.
Carlos, the driver, was by the garage polishing the side mirror of one of Christopher's cars. He was in his fifties and round-faced, with a smile that arrived before his words and a laugh you could hear from three rooms away. I’d met him a few times when he’d driven Christopher to Eleanor’s house.
“Mrs. Vale!” He straightened up when he saw me. “Good morning!”
“Miley,” I corrected. “Please. Mrs. Vale makes me feel like I should be wearing pearls and judging people.”
He laughed, the first real laugh I’d heard in this house. “What’s all this?”
“Breakfast. Turkey bacon, scrambled eggs, toast.” I held out the plate. “I made extra. Do you want it?”
His face lit up. “Do I want it? Ma’am, I have been eating a granola bar in this garage every morning for six years. This is the greatest day of my professional career.”
I gave him one plate. I found Diego, the gardener, trimming hedges near the side entrance, and gave him the other. Diego didn’t speak much English but his expression when he tasted the eggs told me everything I needed to know.
I went back to the kitchen, washed the dishes, and told myself the sting wasn’t there.
Twenty minutes later, Christopher came downstairs, suit on and hair done, looking nothing like the man I’d caught half-dressed an hour earlier. He walked into the kitchen, looked at the empty table, then at me.
“Where’s breakfast?”
I turned from the sink. “You said you didn’t want it.”
“Since you made it, it shouldn’t go to waste at least.”
“Well, it’s gone now.”
“Gone where?”
“Carlos and Diego. They appreciated the effort. It’s not wasted.”
He looked at me. I stared at him right back. The kitchen was very quiet.
“I’m running late for work,” I said. “Eleanor’s expecting me.”
“Right.” He said it like he’d forgotten, which he probably had, that his fake wife was also his grandmother’s chef and had a job to get to.
I picked up my bag and walked toward the door. I could feel his gaze on my back the entire way. I didn’t turn around.
The days settled into a pattern.
I woke early. Did my morning routine. Then I drove to Eleanor’s, cooked for her, spent the afternoon checking on Sazón’s reconstruction with the contractor, and came home to a house where my husband existed behind closed doors.
The social media situation was a different universe entirely.
Overnight, Sazón’s following had jumped by over a hundred thousand.
My name was trending. Reporters were writing what they called a Cinderella story, the small-town chef who married the billionaire actor.
Comments poured in—some kind, some envious, and some genuinely vicious.
But at least three-quarters of them called me beautiful, which I was choosing to focus on because the alternative was reading the ones that called me a gold-digger, and I didn’t have the emotional capacity for that.
Elspeth had been calling. I hadn’t answered. I didn’t have the energy for my cousin right now. Whatever she wanted, it would involve a compliment wrapped around an insult delivered with a smile, and I was full up on those.
Anna and I FaceTimed while I scrolled through comments. Anna was in bed in her usual lounging uniform—eating grapes, face mask on, looking, as always, like a queen reviewing intelligence reports.
“Christopher Vale’s new wife is stunning,” I read aloud. “She looks like she could cook and model at the same time. Anna, they think I’m stunning.”
“You are stunning. I’ve been telling you this for years.”
“Who is this woman and where did she come from? She’s giving main character energy.” I squealed. Actually squealed, like a teenager. I was not proud of it but I was not going to pretend it didn’t happen. “Anna, they’re calling me a main character!”
“Don’t let it go to your head. Read me a mean one.”
“She must be after his money. That one has four thousand likes.”
“Ignore that. What’s the marriage like? Are you two talking?”
“We live in the same house and I see him approximately never. He leaves before I’m awake and comes back after I’ve gone to bed. We’ve had one conversation this week and it was about eggs.”
Anna was quiet for a beat. “Miley.”
“What?”
“Don’t fall in love with him.”
“Anna, that would require him to be in the same room as me for more than ninety seconds, which has not happened since the gala.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
The next morning, I opened the refrigerator, prepared to eat my leftovers from last night.
Gone.
The plate was in the sink, empty and washed.
He’d eaten it, washed the plate himself, and said nothing?
The morning after that, the same thing happened—last night's leftovers vanished, the plate already in the sink by the time I came home.
I started making extra. Not because he asked; he never did. But the plate kept coming back clean, and Miley Torres was constitutionally incapable of feeding someone half-portions when she knew they were hungry.
I had a new name for him now. The Food Thief. Because that’s what he was. A man who told me not to cook for him and then ate everything I made without a word of acknowledgment, like a very tall, very handsome, very emotionally unavailable raccoon.
At Eleanor’s, the days were warm and easy. She was everything Christopher wasn’t—talkative and affectionate, interested in my life with a warmth that felt genuine rather than transactional.
We cooked together sometimes. She’d sit at the kitchen island and tell me stories about building the company with her late husband, about Christopher as a child, about the lemon tree in the garden.
One afternoon, she looked up from her tea and casually said, “When do you spend time with your husband if you’re always here?”
“He’s not really my husband, Eleanor.”
“He’s legally your husband.”
“He’s contractually my husband. There’s a difference.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Is there?”