I woke happy for the second time in my fake marriage, and this time I let myself have it for almost four whole minutes before the world took it back.

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I carried what I'd found in the visitor book around for four days like a stone in my coat, and it changed the weight of everything.

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

In restoration there's a word we use for the history of a thing — provenance. Where it came from, whose hands it passed through, what it survived to reach you. A painting without provenance is worth a fraction of one with it, because what you're really buying, when you buy art, is the story of how it got to be in front of you. I have spent my whole life believing that the story of a thing is the most valuable part of it.

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Three weeks into my fake marriage I woke up happy, and lay very still in the most comfortable bed I had ever owned, and was afraid.

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

By the time Saturday came, Adrian had prepared for the arrival of a grieving seven-year-old the way he would have prepared for a hostile acquisition.

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

"We met," Adrian said, in the back of the car on the way to the Hammonds', in the tone of a man reading a flight-safety card, "eleven months ago. You were restoring a painting for a mutual acquaintance. I came to collect it. It took longer than expected."

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

I signed away a year of my life on a Wednesday morning, in a glass conference room forty floors above the city, with a fountain pen that probably cost more than the seascape I'd been cleaning when my old life ended.

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

The letter that ended my old life came on a Tuesday, tucked between a gas bill and a flyer for a pizza place that had closed two years ago, and I almost threw it out with the pizza.

Paper Vows is a serialized fake-marriage billionaire romance audiobook, written by Mia. New episodes daily.