Chapter Three: The Headlines

Ian’s POV

“You are kidding me.”

I raised an eyebrow at my grandfather across the desk and waited for him to confirm it — to tell me this was some elaborate test of my composure, or a hypothetical he was walking me through for reasons I would understand later, or literally anything other than what it sounded like.

Alan Lawson looked back at me with the expression of a man who had not made a joke since approximately 1987 and did not intend to start today.

I kept my voice level. I was not going to get worked up. I was twenty-seven years old and I ran a multi-billion dollar company and I did not lose my composure in the office.

“This has to be a joke,” I said.

He picked up his phone from the desk and turned the screen toward me.

Media headlines. Three of them, stacked on top of each other on a news aggregator, each one more specific than the last.

LAWSON-THOMPSON MERGER: IAN LAWSON TO WED LAYLA THOMPSON IN BUSINESS ALLIANCE OF THE CENTURY.

THE WEDDING NEW YORK HAS BEEN WAITING FOR: LAWSON AND THOMPSON FAMILIES CONFIRM ARRANGED UNION.

IAN LAWSON AND LAYLA THOMPSON — AMERICA’S NEW POWER COUPLE?

I stared at the screen.

A smile had formed on my grandfather’s face — slow, satisfied, the smile of a man who had executed a plan and was watching it land exactly where he had aimed it.

“Well,” he said, taking the phone back and setting it on the desk, “at least the media got something right for once.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked at me with the full, focused attention of someone who had been waiting for this conversation and had prepared for every version of it.

“Sit down, Ian.”

I sat. Not because I wanted to — because standing while he sat felt like a disadvantage I couldn’t afford right now, and I needed to think clearly, and thinking clearly required not standing in the middle of his study radiating the kind of energy that made people stop listening to your actual words.

I reached for the glass of water on the side table and drank it in one long, steady movement without breaking eye contact.

“Ian,” he said. “My boy. You have to get married.”

“Grandpa.” I set the glass down. “What on earth is actually happening right now. Why would you arrange my life without telling me. Why would you—” I stopped. Took a breath. “Why Layla Thompson.”

“I would never ruin your life,” he said. The warmth in his voice was genuine — I knew my grandfather well enough to hear the difference between performance and truth, and this was truth. He loved me. That was not in question. “I love you too much for that. But I am a businessman. And I made this decision the way a businessman makes decisions.”

“You don’t get to use me as a sacrifice for business.” I looked at him — at the completely unruffled expression, the calm hands folded on the desk, the entire demeanor of a man who had done something and felt no need to apologise for it. “You look proud of yourself. You look genuinely calm about this whole thing.”

“Because it is the right decision.”

“For who?”

He straightened slightly. “When Derick Thompson came to me years ago, his company was in serious trouble. I helped him. And I proposed this arrangement at that time — because both companies need each other for the future. There is a tradition between our families of collaboration, of lending a hand in difficult times.” He adjusted his glasses in the precise, unhurried way he always did when he was making a point he considered irrefutable. “Our companies will hold shares in theirs and theirs in ours. We will be collaborating on multiple major projects this year. I am building your future, Ian. I am building something that will outlast both of us.”

“We are multi-billionaires,” I said. The hurt was there now, underneath the anger, pushing through. “Our business is flourishing. You could have helped him without attaching a price to it. You could have just helped him because it was the right thing to do.”

“Business is not done that way.” His voice was patient in the way of someone who had said this before and expected to say it again. “Derick didn’t know at that time that his own company would face further difficulties down the road. This arrangement protects both families — not just in good times but in difficult ones. It gives both companies something to hold onto when things get hard.” He looked at me steadily. “That is not cruelty, Ian. That is foresight.”

I looked at him.

I thought about everything I had done in this man’s name. The degree I had chosen because he asked me to. The company I had stepped into at twenty-three because he had built it for me and handed it to me and I had not wanted to be the person who turned that away. The paintings I had quietly stopped making because the CEO of Lawson Group did not spend his evenings with a canvas and nobody needed to know that the boardrooms and the conference calls were not, in the end, where I had ever imagined my life.

I had done all of it. Every single thing he asked.

“I can’t get married to Layla Thompson.” I said it clearly, looking him directly in the eye. “You know I can’t. I have always respected your decisions — I have always done what you asked. I studied business for you even though—” I stopped myself. “Even though it wasn’t what I would have chosen. I have done everything you’ve ever asked of me, Grandpa. But this is my life. And at minimum — at the very minimum — you should have told me before you told the media.”

His expression didn’t shift. “You don’t have a choice here, Ian. You are smart, intelligent and hardworking. Everything you have built is real and it is yours. Why would you throw any of it away?”

“I’m not throwing anything away. I’m telling you that marrying someone I don’t know is not something I’m going to—”

“This will not screw up your life,” he said. His voice had taken on the particular quality it got when he had arrived at his final position and intended to stay there. “This is the best decision for both of you. End of discussion, Ian.”

The words landed like a door closing.

I looked at my grandfather — this man I had loved my entire life, this man who had shaped everything I was and everything I had, this man who was sitting across from me with complete confidence that he had done the right thing — and I felt something shift in me that I did not have a clean name for.

Not hatred. Never that. But something that ached in a way that love and betrayal could produce together.

“I am disappointed,” I said. My voice came out quieter than I expected. “This is not the life I want to live.”

I stood up.

He said nothing.

I walked out.

The hallway outside his study was long and quiet, the kind of quiet that a house full of money and history produced — not the quiet of emptiness but the quiet of everything held very still.

I walked through it and out into the morning and stood for a moment with the New York air on my face and the headlines still burning somewhere behind my eyes.

Ian Lawson to wed Layla Thompson.

Layla Thompson.

I pressed my jaw tight and started walking.

Three months ago I had been in Manhattan for a business conference. I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time — or she had, depending on how you looked at it — and what had happened between us in that brief, disastrous encounter had left me with a very specific and very settled opinion about exactly the kind of person Layla Thompson was.

And now I was supposed to marry her.

I stopped at the end of the driveway and looked out at the street — New York going about its morning, entirely indifferent, the city that had always moved at a speed that made personal catastrophes feel small by comparison.

It didn’t feel small.

I can’t believe, I thought, that I am going to be linked to that woman again.

After everything that happened in Manhattan.

After everything she said.

I started walking again.

The city received me without comment, the way it always did — loud and indifferent and entirely unconcerned with the fact that somewhere in a study behind me an old man had just arranged the rest of my life without asking whether I wanted it.

Layla Thompson.

The name sat in my chest like a coal — hot, persistent, refusing to cool.

She had no idea what she was walking into.

And frankly, neither did I.

*******

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— Ruthie ❤️