THE WEDDING

Sophia had imagined her wedding exactly once in her adult life, in the vague, embarrassed way most people did, and it had never once involved a courthouse anteroom with marble floors and a dress fitted for her by strangers eleven days ago.

She stood behind the closed doors with her mother fussing over a loose pin in her hair, and her heart was doing something violent and unfamiliar beneath the borrowed pearls at her throat.

"You don't have to do this," her mother whispered, misreading the panic on her face entirely. "It's not too late to—"

"I want to," Sophia said, and was startled by how true it felt leaving her mouth.

Three years of loving Liam Kingston in complete silence had trained her to expect exactly this feeling and nothing more, a permanent, private ache she carried everywhere and showed no one. She had prepared herself for a courthouse ceremony that would feel like theatre, a legal formality dressed up as romance for the sake of a will's cruel timeline. She had not prepared herself for how her hands would shake.

The doors opened.

Liam stood at the end of the short aisle in a dark suit, and when he saw her, something happened to his face that no amount of media training could have produced. His mouth parted slightly. His hands, usually so still in front of cameras, flexed once at his sides. Marcus, standing beside him as the required witness, actually elbowed him forward when he failed to start walking on cue.

Sophia had watched Liam Kingston close nine-figure deals without blinking. She had never once seen him look like a man who'd forgotten how his own legs worked.

He met her halfway down the aisle, which wasn't part of the plan, and took her hand before the officiant had finished her opening line. His palm was warm and not entirely steady, and Sophia felt that small, involuntary tremor travel straight through her chest.

The vows were short, mostly legal language dressed up in ceremony for the sake of the small crowd Marcus's office had assembled as witnesses. Sophia's mother cried through all of it. Ethan, seated in the front row beside an unfamiliar woman, watched the proceedings with an expression Sophia couldn't quite place and didn't have the emotional capacity to examine.

Then it was time for the kiss, and the officiant barely finished her sentence before Liam's hand found Sophia's jaw, tilting her face up toward his.

It was not the ballroom kiss from three weeks earlier. It was not rehearsed, not measured, not built for a call sheet. It was slower, and it asked a question the ballroom kiss never had, and Sophia answered it before she remembered there were witnesses in the room and a photographer specifically hired to make this look convincing for people who would never know the truth.

When they finally broke apart, Liam's forehead rested against hers, and he whispered something too quiet for anyone else to catch.

"What?" she breathed.

"Nothing," he said, and stepped back, and the moment closed like a door swinging shut on its own weight.

The reception blurred past in champagne and photographs and her mother's happy tears soaking through two entire napkins. Sophia danced with Liam twice, his hand warm against the small of her back both times, and caught him watching her mouth like he was replaying the ceremony kiss on some private loop. She danced once with Marcus, a stiff, formal turn around the floor that left him looking faintly embarrassed by his own footwork.

She did not dance with Ethan. He spent most of the evening near the bar instead, watching the room with the same unreadable expression he'd worn during the vows, occasionally checking his phone with a focus that seemed disproportionate to whatever business could possibly be urgent on his own brother's wedding night.

By midnight, Sophia was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with dancing.

The penthouse, when they finally reached it, held a problem neither of them had solved in advance. The guest wing was mid-renovation, dust sheets draped over furniture, a contractor's schedule still taped to the door. There was exactly one finished bedroom in the entire apartment, and it belonged to Liam.

"I'll take the couch," he said immediately, already reaching for a pillow.

"You will not. It's your apartment."

"It's our apartment now, technically." He said it lightly, though something underneath the words carried no lightness at all. "And I'm not letting my wife sleep on a couch on our wedding night."

The word 'wife' did something complicated to Sophia's stomach that she chose, very deliberately, not to examine.

They compromised eventually on the same bed, a wall of pillows stacked down the middle that felt less like a real boundary and more like a joke neither of them had the energy to laugh at. Sophia lay rigid on her side, achingly aware of every inch of space separating them, of the sound of his breathing slowly evening out into something that resembled real sleep.

She woke sometime past three in the morning to find him standing beside the bed.

He wasn't touching her. He wasn't doing anything at all except looking, moonlight through the window catching the sharp line of his jaw, his expression stripped of every careful control he wore during daylight hours. Sophia kept her eyes barely open, breath even, pretending sleep the way she had once pretended not to love him.

"I'm sorry," Liam whispered, so quietly she almost missed it entirely. "I should have told you three years ago."

He reached out. His fingers brushed a strand of hair from her face, feather light, like he thought touching her too firmly might wake something neither of them was ready to face in the dark.

"Sophia," he breathed, barely a sound at all.

She kept her eyes closed, heart slamming hard against her ribs, and said nothing.

But she heard every single word, and long after his footsteps retreated to the far side of the bed, long after his breathing finally settled into real sleep, Sophia lay awake turning the sentence over and over like a stone she couldn't put down. I should have told you three years ago. Told her what, exactly. Something had happened. Something had started, or ended, or broken, three years before a dead man's will ever forced either of them anywhere near a marriage contract.

Whatever it was, it had waited three years already. She told herself it could wait until morning and didn't believe it either time she said it.