CHAPTER EIGHT — What We Choose

The morning of my wedding, Priya zipped me into a dress that cost more than a year of my old rent and burst into tears before finishing the zipper.

"Stop that," I said, laughing, my own eyes stinging. "You'll ruin my makeup."

"I'm allowed to cry. My best friend is marrying a billionaire in a garden that costs more to maintain than my apartment building." She stepped back. "You look like you stepped out of something Grace would have loved."

My mother's name landed softly in the room. The dress was simple, deliberate — Damien had insisted I choose whatever I wanted rather than what photographed best. Ivory silk, my mother's pearl earrings, the only jewellery of hers I'd kept.

"Are you nervous?" Priya asked.

"Terrified. Not about the ceremony. About how much I want it to be real."

Priya went still. "Does he know that?"

"I don't know what he knows. He's not exactly easy to read."

"For what it's worth," she said, straightening my veil, "the way he looks at you isn't the way men look at women they're performing with for cameras."

My father walked me down the aisle himself, slower than he used to move, tears standing openly in his eyes in a way that would have embarrassed him a year ago.

"Your mother would have loved this," he said, quiet, just for me. "Not the money. Him. He sat with me in that hospital room for two hours last week, just to ask about the hardware store, like it mattered whether I still remembered how to run a register."

"He did that?"

"He didn't tell you?" A real smile, the kind I hadn't seen since before the stroke.

The garden was intimate — Eleanor Cole's Hudson Valley estate, white flowers, nothing like the spectacle I'd braced for. Damien stood at the end of the aisle, watching me the entire walk with an expression I'd never seen on him, undefended, nothing to do with trust clauses or board members watching.

"You look terrified," he murmured when I reached him.

"I am. Not about this part. The part where I stopped being sure I was only doing this for the money."

Something shifted in his face, and this time it didn't retreat. "I wrote my own vows," he said, which wasn't part of any plan Sofia had circulated. "I'm asking you to let me say them anyway."

I nodded, unable to speak.

"I spent ten years believing control was the only thing standing between me and my father's failures," Damien said, low, meant for me even with a hundred eyes watching. "Then you stood in my office with a list of terms instead of demands, and I realised I'd been protecting myself from the wrong thing. I don't know when this stopped being a contract for me. I only know I don't want the year to end. I want to choose you again after it does, for reasons that have nothing to do with a clause my grandfather wrote before either of us was born."

"I came into this to save my father," I said, when I found my voice, "and somewhere along the way I started staying for reasons that had nothing to do with the money. You gave me someone who noticed when I skipped breakfast, who sat with my father to talk about a hardware store, who let me negotiate every term of my own life instead of deciding them for me. I don't want an exit clause anymore. I want this to be real."

He kissed me before the vows were even finished, one hand cradling my jaw like I was something rare, and I understood, with sudden certainty, that whatever had started as thirty-one pages of legal terms had become, somewhere in a rooftop study at two in the morning, the truest thing either of us had ever agreed to.

We didn't know Vaughn was already sitting in a car outside the estate gates, a folder of messages ready to detonate the moment it would do the most damage. But for one afternoon, neither of us was thinking about him at all.