Chapter Two

I closed my eyes.

Renata was still in the doorway. I didn’t have to look to know, I could feel her watching me, that particular silence of hers that managed to be both appalled and curious at once. Downstairs, the string quartet looped through the same eight bars again. Again. Waiting for a ceremony that would happen in three hours whether the right groom showed up or not.

“Julian isn’t coming.” I opened my eyes. “The wedding’s in three hours. I need someone at that altar, and you’re the only person I could think of who’d actually say yes.”

Chapter 2: The Answer

Silence on the line. I could hear wind on his end, like he was standing outside somewhere.

“Say that again,” Sebastian said. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t even blinked, which was somehow worse. “Slowly. Because it sounded like you just asked me to marry you, and I want to be very sure before either of us says something we can’t take back.”

“I’m asking you to marry me. Today. Eleven o’clock, the Harlow Pavilion.” My voice cracked today, just one word, just for a half-second, and I hated it. Hated that I could keep my hands steady and my expression blank and my chin up, and still my own throat would betray me. “I need someone standing there who isn’t him. You hate me enough to actually want to watch this, which makes you the only person I trust not to flinch when it counts.”

He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that has weight to it.

“That’s a hell of a compliment.”

“I’m not joking, Sebastian.”

“I know.” He said.

“You've never once joked with me in three years." Another pause, shorter this time. "Why me. Out of everyone in this city, why call your worst enemy on the council in the middle of a crisis."

"Because everyone else would treat it like a rescue," I said. "Like I owed them something afterward. You'd just do it to watch the Reyes family's faces when they find out what happened. That's not kindness. That's the only kind of yes I can stand to take right now."

“You think I’d say yes out of spite.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

The line went quiet long enough that I pulled the phone from my ear to check the call hadn’t dropped. It hadn’t. The seconds kept ticking, four, five, six, and with each one my certainty cracked a little further. Because if Sebastian Calloway said no, there was no version of today that didn’t end with me standing alone in front of everyone who’d ever doubted me.

"Sebastian."

“I’m thinking.”

“You don’t get to think this long. I need an answer in the next ten seconds, or I’m calling my father and telling him to cancel the venue.”

“Fine.” A beat. “Yes.”

The word hit somewhere I wasn’t braced for. “You’re serious.”

"I don't joke either, Mira. Not about things that matter." A short exhale, half a laugh and half something else. “But if we’re doing this, you hear me out first. I’m not signing anything just to spare your pride in front of people who never deserved it to begin with. If we do this, it’s real.” A real license. A real ceremony. I am not standing beside you for one afternoon and vanishing the second the cameras leave. 

“You understand what I’m telling you.”

I hadn’t expected that. I’d expected a transaction, two names on paper, an arrangement we could quietly end in six months once the gossip cooled. Not this.

"Define real," I said.

"I'll explain when I get there. Be ready by ten. And don't change your mind in the next forty minutes. I mean that."

He hung up before I could ask what he thought I had to lose by changing my mind, and before I could ask the question that had already started forming. The one I should have asked before I’d dialed his number at all.

Why had he answered so fast?

I lowered the phone. Aunt Renata hadn’t moved from the doorway.

“Tell me you did not just ask Sebastian Calloway to marry you,” she said.

“I did.”

“Mira.” The way she said my name, like I was nine years old and had just announced I was climbing onto the roof to get a kite back. "Do you understand who that family is? Do you understand what it means to marry into the Calloway shipping fortune on three hours' notice, with no contract, no terms, nothing but a phone call?"

“I understand that he said yes.”

“That’s what worries me.” She started pacing, working something out faster than she could say it. "Three years on that council and the man has fought you on every proposal you ever brought to the floor. The rezoning bill. The harbor preservation fund. The apprenticeship grant. He voted against every single one, in public, with your name attached to the loss."

"I know what he did. I was there for all of it."

"Then why would a man who's spent three years making sure you lost every fight at that table suddenly drop everything to marry you the same morning your actual fiancé abandons you?"

I didn’t have an answer. I’d been so fixed on the immediate arithmetic, no groom, two hundred guests, three hours, that I hadn’t thought to ask why. Why the one man who should’ve wanted nothing to do with my humiliation had said yes before I’d even finished the sentence.

“Maybe he just hates me enough to enjoy it,” I said. Though even as I heard myself say it, it sounded thinner than it had an hour