Chapter 6: No room to refuse

Tia sat on the porch steps until the cold stopped feeling sharp and started feeling numb, which was somehow worse.

The door opened behind her. She didn't turn around.

"There's more," her father said quietly. "You should hear all of it before you decide anything."

"I already decided."

"Tia." Her mother's voice, closer now, sitting down on the step beside her without asking. "Please. Five more minutes. Then if you still want to walk away, we won't stop you."

Tia stared out at the dark street for a long moment before she finally stood and walked back inside, arms crossed, refusing to sit back down at the table this time.

"Fine," she said. "Talk."

Her father set his phone on the table, screen up, and slid it toward her. "Dylan's mother has a heart condition. Has for two years."

"It's gotten worse this past winter — bad enough that her doctors have told her, in plain terms, to reduce her stress or risk another episode. A serious one."

"I'm sorry to hear that. I still don't see what it has to do with me."

"She believes Dylan remarrying — inside the right circle, someone she trusts — would settle things. Give Rebecca stability, give the company continuity, give her some peace before whatever time she has left runs out." Her father's jaw tightened.

"She's already looking, Tia. There's another family being considered. The Walters. Their daughter's twenty-nine, no ties to us at all."

Tia felt something go cold in her chest. "So marry her, then. Problem solved."

"If that happens," her mother said quietly, "Dylan's mother has made it clear she wants a clean start for Rebecca. New mother figure, new routine, less complication. She used that exact word. *Complication.*"

"Meaning?"

"Meaning us," her mother said. "Meaning you. She's already floated moving with Rebecca to be near her sister in Vancouver if the marriage happens and things need, in her words, 'a fresh environment.'"

"A visit here and there, maybe. Holidays, if we're lucky. Nothing like what you have with her now."

Tia's stomach tightened. "She wouldn't actually do that."

"I've known that woman for twenty years," her mother said. "She would, and she'd tell herself it was kindness the whole time."

Nobody spoke for a moment. Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked, ordinary and small, and it felt obscene that the house could go on being an ordinary house while this conversation was happening in it.

"There's a deadline," her father added, quieter now. "Dylan told us himself. His mother wants a decision within the month. If it's not you, it's the Walters girl, and once that door closes, Tia, it's closed. There's no coming back from it to ask twice."

"A month." Tia laughed, short and humorless. "You want me to decide whether to marry someone in a *month.*"

"We're not asking you to decide tonight."

"You're asking me to decide at all! That's the problem!" Her voice cracked upward, and she hated it, hated that she couldn't keep it level in front of them.

"Two weeks ago my biggest problem was a cheating boyfriend. Now you're telling me I have a month to agree to marry a man I've spoken to maybe a dozen times in my life, or lose my niece to Vancouver."

She wiped her eyes hard and looked up at both of them, something steadier settling into her voice.

"I need to ask you something, and I need an honest answer. How much of this is actually about Rebecca? And how much of it is about those contracts you're so afraid of losing?"

Her father's face went rigid. "How could you say that? Since you were a child, we have done everything within our power to give you what you wanted."

"Every choice, every opportunity — we made sure you had it. And now that we're finally asking something of you, we've become monsters?"

"You provided. Yes. I'm not denying that." Her voice shook, but she held his gaze. "But now you're asking me to pay the price for those things, and it's a price way beyond anything I can actually afford."

"We are asking you," her father said, "to consider the overall situation for once, and stop being so selfish."

Something in Tia went very quiet and very cold.

"In your eyes," she said slowly, "your daughter is someone who has to be like Kate. Selfless. Always presentable. The one who lets your company climb to new heights through Hart Enterprises. The one who makes you proud."

"Unlike me — the one who doesn't want to silently walk the path you already mapped out for her. Selfish."

"Yes," her father said, and it landed like a slap, because he didn't even hesitate. "If Kate were here, she wouldn't have argued with us about helping the company."

"She would have taken responsibility. She would have understood our situation."

"Too bad she's not here, then."

The silence that followed felt like the whole house had stopped breathing.

"Tia!" Her mother's hand flew to her mouth, eyes filling instantly. "How could you say that?"

"I'm sorry." Tia's voice cracked, and this time she meant it, horrified at herself the second the words were out. "I didn't mean it like that."

"I just — you were always comparing me to her. Since I was a kid. I had to look up to her, had to measure myself against her, and she set a benchmark I could never actually reach. Straight A's. The internships everyone fought over. The way she'd walk into a room and people just — noticed her, wanted to be near her, wanted to *be* her."

"Sometimes it felt like I couldn't breathe standing next to that. I don't want to be her. I never did. I just wanted to be myself. Just me. And now you're asking me to be her shadow. To take her place. That's too much to ask of anyone."

Her mother crossed the room and pulled her into her arms without asking, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

"We never asked you for anything before this," her mother said finally, quiet, into her hair. "Not once. Can't you see the bigger picture, just this once? Forget the deals. Forget the contracts, I mean that."

"Think about Rebecca. She's innocent in all of this. What if the new wife does something to hurt her, even without meaning to? Could you live with that on your conscience?"

"Mom, Dylan Hart is no pushover. He wouldn't let anything happen to her."

"But what if he's not there?" her mother pressed gently. "He can't be everywhere at once, Tia. He can't be there for her twenty-four hours a day."

"Instead of putting all your hope in a man you barely know to protect her, why can't you be the one who actually steps up?"

Tia turned away from both of them, walked to the window, stared out at nothing.

Her mother came and stood behind her, not touching her, just close.

"Do you remember," she said softly, "the last time you saw Rebecca? Before the funeral got closer and everything got complicated?"

Tia didn't answer. She remembered exactly.

"She drew a picture," her mother went on. "At Christmas, the year before. You, her, and a dog neither of you actually has. She labeled it — she could barely spell yet, but she labeled it. *Me and Auntie Tia.* I still have it. I kept it because I thought, someday, she'd want it back."

"Stop."

"I'm not trying to hurt you."

"You're doing a very good job of it anyway." Tia's voice came out raw. She turned around, and her mother's face was wet.

Her father was still sitting at the table looking like a man watching two things he loved collide and unable to stop either one.

"I need you to understand," her mother said, "that I am not asking you to save a business. I don't care about the business, not really, not compared to this."

"I am asking you to help me keep that little girl in our lives. That's the only thing I actually care about in any of this, and I am sorry, truly sorry, that the only way I know how to ask you is by breaking your heart a little to do it."

Something in that landed wrong, in a way Tia couldn't say out loud. It wasn't that her mother wanted Rebecca in their lives — she believed that completely, believed it was the truest thing either of her parents had said all night.

It was what sat underneath it. They weren't really asking her to save a six-year-old. They were asking her to keep Kate present.

Even buried, even gone almost a year now, Kate still came first, still shaped every decision this family made without anyone having to say her name out loud. And Tia understood, with a kind of quiet, hollow clarity, that she had apparently fallen short of her sister even in the year Kate hadn't been alive to outshine her.

Now they wanted to make that ghost a permanent fixture in her life too — something she'd be measured against in every choice she made, for however long this arrangement lasted.

Tia stood there for a long time, arms wrapped around herself, feeling something in her chest give way slowly, like a wall she'd been holding up for two weeks finally cracking under weight it was never built to hold.

"I'm not agreeing to marry him," she said finally, quiet and shaking. "Not tonight. Not like this."

"Okay," her father said carefully.

"But I'll meet him." She wiped her face with the back of her hand, furious at herself for crying in front of them, furious at all of it. "I'll hear whatever he has to say."

"That's all I'm agreeing to right now. Not marriage. A conversation."

Her mother let out a breath that sounded like it had been held for two weeks straight. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me." Tia's voice was flat now, exhausted past the point of anger. "I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing it for her. Don't ever mistake the two."

She left the room without waiting for a response, climbed the stairs to her old bedroom, and sat down on the edge of the bed she hadn't slept in properly since she was eighteen.

She stared at nothing, trying to understand how a month ago her biggest worry had been a finance exam.

Downstairs, she could hear her mother crying quietly, and her father's low voice trying to comfort her, and underneath both of those sounds, faint and constant, the specific silence of a house that had already decided something even before she'd said yes.

She had no idea, lying back against the pillows that still smelled faintly like her childhood, that the man on the other end of this arrangement was, at that exact moment, having an almost identical conversation of his own — and liking it even less than she did.