Chapter Three

“Or maybe,” Renata said, slower now, “he’s wanted something from you longer than you’ve noticed. And your wedding falling apart just handed it to him.”

Chapter 3: The Motorcade

My phone buzzed before I could answer her. A text from my father.

The Reyes family called. They’re saying you need to reconsider before this becomes a scandal that follows the Voss name for a generation. Call me before you do anything you can’t undo.

Reyes. Julian’s family. They’d waited exactly long enough for the news to travel through whatever channel these things travel through, the low, efficient hum of old money communicating with itself, and now they were circling, trying to manage a story before anyone could tell it without their permission first. It was what they did. What all of them did. Not cruelty exactly, more like reflex. Protect the name, contain the damage, find out who’s talking before the talking gets away from you.

I typed back four words. Too late. Already done.

It wasn’t true yet. Sebastian hadn’t arrived. There was no ceremony, no signature, nothing binding except a phone call and a man’s word, and his word, by every account I’d ever heard exchanged around the council table, was worth exactly as much as it cost him to keep it. Which was either nothing, or everything. I genuinely didn’t know which. I’d spent three years forming my read of him and I still couldn’t say with certainty what lived underneath the composure. Something did. I’d always sensed that much.

Aunt Renata was still pacing when I heard it from the window. Cars. Not one, but several, pulling into the courtyard below in careful formation, trailing white ribbon from the front grilles like they’d been dressed in a hurry by someone who still knew exactly what they were doing.

“What is this,” I said, crossing to the glass, “and why does it look like an actual wedding.”

Renata appeared at my shoulder, and for once she didn’t have a ready answer either. Six cars. A small string ensemble setting up folding chairs near the front gate, the musicians shaking out their wrists and tuning in the morning light. Someone was unloading what looked like an entire florist’s stock of white peonies onto the front steps, passing armfuls of them down a human chain like they’d rehearsed it.

“He did this,” Renata said slowly, “in under forty minutes.”

“He has staff for everything. That’s what money like that buys you.” I said it like I believed it, and felt the words sit slightly wrong on the way out.

I went back to the mirror to finish what the makeup artist had started before the morning fell apart. My reflection looked composed. A little pale around the eyes, maybe, but composed, and composition was what I had, when I didn’t have anything else. Twenty minutes later I came down the staircase in a dress chosen for a different groom entirely, one hand trailing the banister, and stopped.

The sound reached me halfway down.

Not what I’d braced for. Not the careful, somber kind of music that accompanies a bride salvaging a canceled wedding, the kind meant to sound like dignity while everyone in earshot knows better. This was something else entirely. Bright and full, brass threading through strings, rising through the front hall like the day had simply decided to stop apologizing and carry on regardless. Like nothing had gone wrong this morning. Like nothing had ever gone wrong at all.

“Mira, the groom is here!” my younger cousin shouted up the stairs, far too luminous with excitement for my comfort.

I descended the last few steps and stopped.

Sebastian Calloway stood in my family’s entryway in a charcoal suit so precisely fitted that it could only have been altered this morning, which it very probably had been. He was flanked by two people I recognized from council newsletters and had never once encountered in person.

His mother. His father.

I’d known Sebastian for three years. I had attended dozens of functions where his presence was expected, served on two subcommittees where his name appeared on the documentation, sat across a long mahogany table from him through more tedious quarterly reviews than I cared to count. In all of that time, through all of those rooms, I had never seen his parents.

“You didn’t have to do all this,” I said, before anyone else could speak.

“I disagree.” He crossed the hall toward me, unhurried, and up close his eyes held none of the cold, patient calculation I’d spent three years and thirty-odd council sessions convincing myself lived at the center of him. They held something else. Something that looked almost like resolve, though resolve of what kind I couldn’t say. “If I let you walk out of your family’s house alone, with no procession, no music, nothing but your coat and a car, what story runs by tomorrow? That Mira Voss got left at the altar and settled for a quiet, embarrassed elopement slipped out the back. I’m not doing that to you.” His voice was even, measured, as though he’d thought this through already and arrived at the only acceptable conclusion. “Whatever this is, it isn’t going to look like a consolation prize.”

His mother stepped forward then and took both my hands in hers before I could calculate how to respond to any of that. She was smaller than I’d imagined from the photographs, and the warmth in her face was so uncomplicated, so immediately given, that it was briefly the most disorienting thing that had happened to me all morning, and the morning had not been short on disorientation.