Cold CEO hated his contract bride—until she tossed away designer dresses and stole his heart!

The Man Who Wasn't Seen

Chapter 1: The Geometry of Absence

Elias's life was a series of silent repetitions, a cycle of grays and muted tones unfolding in the indifferent vastness of a major city. For all practical purposes, he was a well-dressed ghost, a blur at the edge of everyone else's vision. His existence boiled down to occupying space without leaving a trace, breathing the same air as others but without sharing their vitality.

That day, like so many others, Elias's invisibility reached an almost palpable peak. He was standing in line at the bakery, the aroma of fresh bread and coffee hanging in the air like an unfulfilled promise. When his turn came, the attendant—a young woman with fiery red hair and distracted eyes—simply looked right through him. Not with malice, but with the absolute lack of recognition reserved for inanimate objects.

"Next!" she sang out, her voice loud and clear, directed at the man behind Elias, a hurried executive talking on his cell phone.

Elias felt the air thin in his lungs. It wasn't the first time, nor would it be the last, but the precision of that oversight hit him with the force of a punch. He tried to speak, but his throat felt coated in sand. The executive, without even noticing the interruption, lightly nudged Elias aside, as if stepping around a lamppost.

He left the bakery without the bread, without the coffee, and with the cold certainty that there was something fundamentally wrong with his frequency in the universe. He wasn't ugly, nor was he particularly handsome. He wasn't tall, nor short. Elias was the personification of the middle ground, the epitome of visual mediocrity. His features were so neutral they seemed designed to be forgotten.

He walked down the sidewalk, and the city seemed to conspire to reinforce his condition. Couples laughed, children ran, and traffic flowed, but Elias was an island of silence in the middle of the whirlwind. He watched a woman stumble and instinctively reached out to steady her. She recovered on her own, and her gaze, as she stood up, passed through Elias like a ray of light through clean glass. She thanked the air, or perhaps fate, and moved on.