Chapter 3: The Wedding

The ceremony was exactly as small and exactly as cold as Nathaniel had promised. Forty guests, a private chapel upstate, white flowers chosen by someone on his staff because Sienna hadn’t had the heart to choose them herself. She wore her mother’s veil and her own grief like a second dress underneath the first, and when she walked down the aisle toward a man who was marrying her the way other men signed leases, she kept her chin up because forty people, investors, board members, a scattering of relatives from both sides who hadn’t spoken to each other in years, were watching to see if she’d break.

She didn’t break. She had promised herself she wouldn’t, standing in the small dressing room an hour earlier while her aunt fussed with the veil and pretended not to notice Sienna’s hands shaking. This was a business transaction wearing the shape of a wedding. She could survive a business transaction. She’d survived worse.

Nathaniel was waiting for her at the altar in a black suit so perfectly cut it looked almost unfair, his expression composed into something that might, to a stranger, have passed for warmth. Only Sienna, walking toward him with her father’s absence sitting like a stone in her chest, could see how carefully constructed it was, the practiced angle of his mouth, the stillness of a man who had learned long ago how to give a room exactly what it needed to see.

The officiant’s words blurred together. Sienna caught fragments, in sickness, in health, until and found herself distracted by smaller things instead: the warmth of Nathaniel’s hand when he finally took hers, steadier than she expected, and the fact that up close, without an audience of one, his eyes weren’t as flat and cold as they seemed from across a boardroom table. There was something moving underneath the surface of him. She didn’t yet know what.

She said the words when it was her turn. She let him slide the ring onto her finger, and his hands, she noticed distantly, were steadier than hers.

“You may kiss the bride.”

It was brief. Efficient. Rehearsed, she told herself, the kind of kiss two people gave each other when an audience demanded proof of a marriage neither of them had chosen. His mouth against hers for exactly as long as the moment required and not a second longer.

And still, still, something in her chest lit up and refused to go out. A small, unwelcome spark that had no business existing between two people who’d signed a contract instead of falling in love, that made no sense given everything she knew about who he was and what he’d done to her family. She felt it anyway, sharp and sudden, in the half second before he pulled back.

She hated that she noticed it. She hated more that, pulling back, she caught him noticing it too, a flicker of surprise crossing his face before the careful blankness slid back into place, like a door closing on a room he hadn’t meant to let her see into. For just a moment, Nathaniel Voss looked less like a man who’d calculated every outcome of this marriage in advance and more like a man who’d just been caught off guard by his own reaction.

“Congratulations, Mrs. Voss,” he murmured, just for her, his voice low enough that only she could hear it. Then he turned to face the cameras with a smile so convincing that no one in that chapel could have guessed it wasn’t real, the same practiced ease he brought to every room, every negotiation, every performance the world demanded of him.

Sienna smiled too. She had learned, over the last three days, that she was good at that, good at performing exactly what a room required of her, a skill she’d inherited from a father who’d spent thirty years running a company while grief and illness ate away at him behind closed doors. She only wondered, walking back down the aisle on the arm of a man who was now legally her husband and had never once asked what she wanted from any of this, how long she’d have to keep performing before it stopped feeling like a performance at all.

At the reception, small, quiet, more business function than celebration, she watched him move through the room the way he moved through everything: efficiently, purposefully, shaking hands and accepting congratulations with the same measured warmth he’d shown at the altar. It wasn’t until much later, when most of the guests had gone and the two of them stood alone for the first time all evening near the emptied dance floor, that he said something that wasn’t performance at all.

“Your father would have hated this,” he said quietly, not quite looking at her. “The idea of it. Me, standing where I’m standing.”

Sienna hadn’t expected honesty from him. She wasn’t sure what to do with it.

“Probably,” she admitted.

“For what it’s worth,” Nathaniel said, “I don’t think he was entirely wrong to hate the idea of me.”

And then, before she could ask what he meant by that, he excused himself, leaving her standing alone in her wedding dress in a room that no longer had anyone in it to perform for.