The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband – Episode 22
By noon the next day, Natalie stood beneath a glass tower whose entrance looked more like a private gallery than an apartment lobby. A doorman in a tailored coat greeted Sebastian with unmistakable recognition before correcting himself and offering a neutral welcome. Natalie noticed the stumble. Sebastian pretended to be occupied with her suitcase.
“Your friend lives here?” she asked, tilting her head to follow the building into the pale winter sky. One month of rent in such a place could probably cover her mother’s treatment twice.
“He inherited money and very little common sense,” Sebastian said. The description was useful because it explained any luxury Natalie questioned and insulted no real person except himself.
The private elevator required a key card Sebastian carried in his wallet. Natalie watched him select the highest floor without consulting a message or note. He knew the security system, the elevator controls, even the exact moment the doors would close. Every smooth movement produced another question, but the mirrored walls trapped them behind her reflection.
When the doors opened, sunlight poured across marble floors and floor-to-ceiling windows. The city spread below them in silver, blue, and glass, so distant that traffic appeared silent. Natalie entered carefully, afraid the soles of her inexpensive boots might leave evidence that someone like her had crossed the threshold. She had cleaned houses with rooms this beautiful, but she had never been invited to inhabit one. The difference made every step feel borrowed.
“This is an apartment?” Her voice echoed through the open living room. “It looks like a hotel designed for royalty.”
Sebastian set down the bags. “My friend likes excessive things.” He had removed the staff and personal photographs, but the penthouse still betrayed him through taste: dark wood, restrained colors, shelves of history books, and a chessboard positioned beside the same chair he instinctively approached. He stopped before sitting.
Natalie moved toward the windows. From here, the hospital district lay only a few streets away, and B.M. Enterprises rose in the opposite direction. The location erased hours of buses and cold walks. Relief came first; then guilt followed because comfort this large could never truly be free. “What exactly does your friend expect us to do?”
“Keep the place occupied. Water the plants. Don’t burn down the kitchen.” Sebastian pointed toward a row of healthy greenery that building staff maintained every morning when he was absent.
She gave him a skeptical look. “And he lets strangers live here for that?”
“I’m not a stranger to him.” Sebastian held her gaze. “You aren’t either, if you’re with me.” The answer sounded intimate enough to quiet her suspicion, though it deepened the ache created by his deception.
Natalie walked through the rooms, opening doors only after asking permission. The guest suite was larger than her old house’s living room, while the primary bedroom held a bed wide enough to make their separate-room arrangement look absurd. Sebastian directed her toward the guest room, respecting the boundary before she needed to defend it.
She found an untouched wardrobe and a bathroom stocked with new toiletries. “Your friend prepared all this?” The labels matched the inexpensive brand she used, not the imported products arranged elsewhere. Even the unscented soap suited her mother’s sensitivity, though no stranger could reasonably know that. The apartment felt less like an available residence than a stage arranged around details from Natalie’s private life.
“Daniel helped.” Another partial truth. Daniel had purchased everything before dawn from a list Sebastian constructed out of details he had pretended not to notice.
Natalie ran one finger along the folded towels. No one had prepared a place specifically for her since her mother became ill. She turned away before Sebastian could see how strongly the small kindness affected her. “Tell him I’ll take good care of everything.”
“He knows.” The softness in Sebastian’s reply made her glance back. For a second, the apartment did not feel borrowed. It felt as though he had brought her home.
They unpacked together. Natalie placed her mother’s photograph on the guest-room nightstand, then carried the medical folder to the desk. Sebastian put his few visible belongings in the smaller room across the hall, maintaining the fiction of a man who had arrived with no more than a suitcase. His real clothes waited behind a locked dressing-room door Daniel had disguised as wall paneling.
In the kitchen, Natalie discovered a refrigerator filled with food she liked. Sebastian blamed Daniel again. “Your friend is remarkably considerate for a trust-fund baby with no common sense,” she observed.
“He has occasional strengths.” Sebastian loosened his collar, and Natalie laughed. The sound transformed the immaculate kitchen into something lived in. He found himself imagining breakfasts here, arguments resolved beside the windows, and her mother’s photograph remaining long after any supposed house-sitting arrangement ended.
His phone vibrated with a message from Daniel: the hospital transfer had cleared, recorded under George Quinn’s name. Sebastian locked the screen before Natalie could see it. The debt that had terrified her was gone, but relief would arrive wrapped in a lie he had deliberately chosen.
Natalie opened a cabinet and found two wineglasses already set apart from the others, as if someone expected a couple. “When do I meet this mysterious friend?” she asked. Sebastian looked across his own kitchen at the wife who believed its owner was somewhere far away. “Soon,” he promised, knowing that when she finally met the man behind the story, she might never trust her husband again.
