It felt like fate the day I met Ethan. A warm spring afternoon, a cozy bookstore café, and a shared love for “Pride and Prejudice.” Our hands brushed reaching for the same copy, and when I looked up into his warm brown eyes, something shifted. His smile—dimples and all—was disarming. “Looks like we have the same taste,” he said. I laughed nervously. “You can have it.” “How about we share it?” he offered, and just like that, we were curled up on a sofa, sipping coffee and swapping stories.
From that moment, our romance unfolded like a dream. Candlelit dinners, spontaneous weekend escapes, and those deep, late-night conversations that make you feel like you’ve known someone forever. Three months in, Ethan proposed—right there in the same café where we met. Sunset bathed the room in gold as he knelt and said, “You’ve brought so much joy into my life. Will you marry me?” I was overwhelmed. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!”
We planned a small lakeside wedding, just close friends and family. The night before, laughter filled the air. Ethan’s sister Olivia, always the jokester, nearly spilled her drink and quipped, “You two deserve an Oscar for pulling off the fake marriage thing.” I froze. “Fake marriage?” Her face went pale. “Wait… you didn’t know?” My heart dropped. “Know what?” She hesitated, then whispered, “Ethan’s inheritance. Our grandfather’s will said he had to marry within six months to get it.”
I felt the floor vanish beneath me. Every kiss, every promise—was it all a performance? I confronted Ethan. He admitted the truth but insisted he’d fallen for me genuinely. “It started because of the will,” he said, “but I stayed because I love you.”
I was shattered. The proposal I thought was pure turned out to be tangled in obligation. Yet, somewhere in the wreckage, I had to decide: was love born from a lie still love? Or was it just another storybook illusion?
