Love You, Loud and Clear

For five years Violet Sterling let Nathan Payne believe she had been deaf and mute since birth. He was unknown in his field then and she kept it up through the worst of it, and she paid for his studio out of what her parents had left her without telling him whose money it was. His hearing came back. The studio turned into a company. With that settled he said what he had been holding back: he had never wanted to marry her, and the fiancee who had dropped him when he had nothing was still on his mind. Violet answered him in her own voice. She ended it and took the match her family had arranged for her in childhood, with Ian Grant.