Three hours after I got married, I heard my husband plan how to take my apartment and convince everyone that I was losing my mind. What he didn’t know was that he had married the only woman he should ever have tried to deceive.

Under that bed, still in my wedding dress on, I heard Adrian laughing.

It wasn’t a loud laugh.

It was worse.

It was that small, intimate laugh of someone who feels safe because he believes that the person he is talking about will never be able to hear him.

“What if Mara doesn’t sign?” he asked.

His mother replied without hesitation:

“He’s going to sign.” First we make her doubt herself. Then we make everyone doubt her.

I had a hand over my mouth.

With the other, I was slowly looking for my cell phone between the folds of the dress.

Then I heard Bianca’s name.

Then I heard the word “pregnancy.”

And finally I understood that the apartment of 18.5 million pesos was not the only thing they wanted to take from me.

It was still twenty-three minutes before my husband discovered that his wife was not the naïve woman he thought he had taken to the altar.

And less than a day for him to understand something even worse:

Mara Villanueva had never been simply an administrative assistant.

CHAPTER 1 — The Woman Adrian Thought He Knew

Three hours earlier, I had thought it was the happiest day of my life.

Our reception had ended in a Tagaytay garden covered in warm lights. There were white flowers on the tables, empty cups everywhere, and petals crushed on the grass by hundreds of shoes.

Adrian Monteverde was my husband.

It still seemed strange to me to think about it.

My husband.

During the ceremony he had held both my hands and promised me that no matter what happened, he would never allow me to feel alone.

I believed him.

That was my real mistake.

Not having loved him.

To have confused its simplicity with honesty.

We met two years earlier, when I was working at a small consulting firm. At least, that was the version of my life that Adrian knew.

I was driving an old sedan.

He lived in a simple apartment.

He bought clothes without flashy brands.

When we went out, he never proposed expensive restaurants. Our best memories seemed to have been built with small things: street food, cheap coffee, market-bought flowers, and conversations inside my car when neither of us wanted to say goodbye yet.

“When we have money,” Adrian told me, “we will travel.

I was smiling.

“What if we never have any?”

He looked at me as if the question were absurd.

“Then we don’t travel. As long as you are there, it is enough for me.

For a long time, that phrase was one of my favorites.

After our wedding it became one of the lies that I had the hardest time forgetting.

Adrian thought I was living on my paycheck.

I didn’t know that my father, Ramon Villanueva, had founded Villanueva Prime Development.

I didn’t know that our company had projects in Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao.

I didn’t know that my mother, before she died, had asked me for something that ended up defining so much of my adult life.

Never let a man fall in love with your money first.

That’s why I didn’t arrive at my first date with Adrian using my father’s last name as a key.

I didn’t arrive with a driver.

I did not talk about companies.

I didn’t show him statements.

I wanted to know who could love me when there was nothing impressive to look at.

And for two years, Adrian seemed to give me the right answer.

He never asked me for money.

He never complained about my limits.

He never asked too much when I said I couldn’t afford something.

Even when I bought the apartment for 18.5 million, he accepted my explanation that it had been possible thanks to family savings and financial movements that he had been preparing for years.

The money was mine.

But a part of the payment process had gone through Adrian’s account.

I had read every page related to the operation.

Every number.

Every condition.

Each signature.

Celeste Monteverde, his mother, interpreted that movement of money in a different way.

He thought I didn’t understand my own documents.

That detail would be important later.

That night, however, I still didn’t know that Celeste had been looking at my apartment for some time as if it were an anticipated inheritance.

After the reception, Adrian and I went to a luxury hotel in BGC.

I went up to the suite first.

He stayed down resolving some payments.

I was tired, my feet hurt, and I had enough pins in my hair to set off a metal alarm.

But he was happy.

Ridiculously happy.

Then I had a stupid idea.

I wanted to hide under the bed.

When Adrian entered, he planned to scare him.

That was all.