Eight Years of Maybe One Day of I Do—Bride Swapped Deal With It novel Chapter 83

Chapter 5

The headline was pure tabloid bait, but the photo underneath made my stomach drop.

It was a formal family portrait.

Derek and Nina stood center frame, flanked by what looked like every Connor who mattered.

Derek’s father was there.

The man ran a multi-billion dollar empire and supposedly only showed up for quarterly earnings calls. But here he was, front and center, all smiles.

Even the Connor grandfather-who’d been living in some luxury medical facility in Switzerland for the past three years-had apparently made the trip.

He was holding Simon like the kid was the second coming.

The whole extended family had turned out.

That’s when it clicked.

This wasn’t just a photo op. This was the family making a very public statement-that Nina belonged, that Simon was the golden child, that the Connor legacy was secure.

When Derek and I got married, exactly zero family members showed up.

The company had been circling the drain back then, weeks away from bankruptcy.

Nobody cared about weddings-they just needed Derek legally attached to my family’s money before the whole thing collapsed.

So we’d stood in some cramped chapel in Paris with a priest who kept mixing up our names, signed some papers, and called it done.

We didn’t even file the marriage license until months later.

I’d been so desperately in love with him that even that bare-bones ceremony had felt like a fairy tale. For nine years, I’d held onto that memory like it was something precious.

Now it just felt like evidence of how pathetic I’d been.

The article had a slideshow.

I watched it cycle through one image after another.

The reception-easily two hundred people in black tie.

A shot of the whole Connor clan raising champagne glasses.

Derek’s mother presenting Nina with some kind of ornate jewelry box…

Then one photo froze me completely.

Clearly taken by a photographer with a telephoto lens, zoomed in so tight you could see everything.

Derek and Nina at the courthouse, pressed together in front of that tacky “Just Married” backdrop.

His hand was tangled in her hair as he kissed her, and she was smiling against his mouth, her eyes closed in what looked like genuine bliss.

You could practically feel the heat coming off them through the screen.

This was what Derek had called a “fake marriage for paperwork.”

This was what “just getting some documents sorted” looked like.

There had never been anything fake about any of it.

Nina was the daughter-in-law the Connors had wanted from day one.

She was the woman Derek had spent a decade unable to get over.

And I’d just been too stupid to see it.

My hand had gone numb from how hard I was gripping my phone. I was about to force myself to turn it off when a new message popped up.

Unknown number.

An image loaded. Some kind of medical document.

Ultrasound results.

Patient: Nina Laurent

Status: Intrauterine pregnancy, approximately 4 weeks

I stopped breathing.

Two more texts appeared below it:

[Annie, Derek and I are pregnant again.]

[He made me promise not to tell you, but I can’t keep this from you. My kids need their father in their lives. Please… can you just let him go?]

Everything went numb.

Four weeks ago, Derek had been in Seattle “drowning in back-to-back meetings” for that subsidiary IPO.

That had been the only time in eight years he’d gone three straight days without calling.

He hadn’t been too busy.

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