The Night Before My sisters Wedding

Adelaide's POV:

The termination letter was still folded in the side pocket of my carry-on when I landed, like keeping it close would somehow make it less real.

“We appreciate your two years of service. Effective immediately.”

Two years, summed up in one sentence and a cardboard box of desk plants I'd left behind because I couldn't stand to carry them through the airport.

Two years since I'd left. Two years since I'd seen my family in person. And I was coming home with nothing to show for it but a firing letter and a suitcase.

I was still replaying the meeting in my head, my manager's careful corporate voice, “we're restructuring, it's not personal,” when a man walked past the gate ahead of me and every other thought in my head went quiet.

He wasn't doing anything. That was the strange part. He was just walking, phone in hand, a suit that fit like it had been built around him rather than bought off a rack, and something in the way he moved made the whole terminal feel like it was arranging itself around him instead of the other way around.

People's heads turned. He didn't seem to notice, or didn't care, which somehow made it worse.

I didn't approach him. I wasn't the kind of woman who approached men like that. I just watched him disappear toward the exit and felt an entirely unreasonable pang of loss over a stranger I'd known for four seconds.

"You're staring," said the woman next to me at baggage claim, amused.

"I'm not staring. I'm curious..." I responded.

"Sure." She followed my gaze anyway. "Oh, him. That's Victor Langford."

The name meant nothing to me and everything to my face, apparently, because she laughed.

"Heir to Langford Enterprises. Billionaire, obviously, in case the suit didn't give it away."

She said it like reciting a fact she'd repeated many times, the way people talk about celebrities they'll never meet.

"Every single woman in this city has a theory about how to get his attention. Waste of time, though."

"Why's that?" I raised an eyebrow.

"He's getting married. Word is it's practically finalized. Whoever she is, she got the one man half this airport would sell a kidney for."

Of course he was. Of course the first man in longer than I wanted to admit to make my stomach do something interesting was already someone else's.

I told myself it didn't matter. I had bigger problems than a stranger's marital status. I had a father who was going to ask about my job within the first ten minutes of seeing me, and no good answer to give him.

The Hale house looked exactly the way I'd left it, which somehow stung more than if it had changed. Same iron gates, same too-green lawn maintained by a man named Rodrigo who'd worked for us since before I could walk, same enormous front door that made visitors feel small on purpose.

Nobody was waiting on the porch. Nobody rushed out when the car pulled up.

I let myself in with my old key, half expecting it not to work anymore, and stood in the foyer with my suitcase like a delivery nobody had ordered.

Voices came from the living room. I followed them and found my father standing over a table covered in wrapped boxes and velvet cases, gesturing at a woman I didn't recognize who was taking notes on a clipboard.

"These go to the Langford estate Thursday," he was saying. "Not a day later. And make sure the jade set is insured before it leaves this house."

Betrothal gifts. I didn't need anyone to tell me what they were. The family group had already announced that my twin sister was marrying some rich heir.

I stood in the doorway for what felt like a very long time before anyone noticed me.

"Adelaide." My father said my name the way you'd note an item on a list you'd forgotten about. Not surprised. Not relieved. Just registering the fact of me. "You're back."

"Two years, and that's the greeting I get." I replied, trying not to sound hurt.

"I heard about your job." He didn't ask how the flight was. Didn't ask if I was tired, or hungry, or how it had felt to be gone that long.

He just looked at me the way he looked at underperforming assets. "Failed again. Couldn't even hold onto a secretary position."

"It was an executive assistant role, and I was let go because of restructuring, not because...."

"How exactly," he said, cutting through me like I hadn't spoken at all, "do you expect me to hand you a branch of this company, when you can't keep a job some fresh graduate could manage?"

Heat rose up my throat, fast and familiar. "Maybe if you'd given me half the opportunities you gave Andrea instead of deciding I was a disappointment before I ever….."

"Adelaide." My mother's voice cut in from the stairwell, sharp in a different way, the kind of sharp that wasn't aimed at hurting me but at ending the conversation before it became a scene. "Not today."

"Mom…"

"Today is Andrea's day." She came down the last few steps, already dressed for the evening, pearls at her throat, every hair in place.

"The bridal shower starts in a few hours. I will not have this house's first thirty minutes of hosting a happy occasion ruined by you two going at each other again."

"I just got here."

"Then go rest. You look exhausted." It wasn't a suggestion. "Ten minutes. Then come down and help us finish setting up. We have a lot to do before people arrive."

I looked between them, my father already turning back to his clipboard woman like I'd been dismissed from a meeting, my mother already moving toward the kitchen like the matter was closed.

Neither of them asked if I was okay. Neither of them asked about the two years at all.

I went upstairs.

My room was exactly as I'd left it, dust-free, clearly cleaned on some schedule despite nobody living in it, which felt like its own kind of insult. Kept nice for an occasion, not for me.

I sat on the edge of the bed and felt the tears come up fast and ugly, and then, out of pure stubbornness, I pushed them back down.

I would not cry over something this predictable. This was the exact house I'd left. The exact father. I didn't know what I'd expected, walking in today, but some small, foolish part of me had hoped two years might have changed something.

It hadn't. Nothing here changed. Only I did, apparently, and not in ways that counted for anything.

I lay back, meaning to rest my eyes for a minute, and the exhaustion of the flight dragged me under before I could stop it.

I woke to music.

Not the soft, ambient kind either, but the full swell of a party already well underway, laughter and clinking glasses drifting up through my closed door.

I sat up too fast, head spinning, phone confirming what my body already knew: I'd slept through the ten minutes I'd been given and several hours besides. The party had started without me and nobody cared to even wake me up.

I dressed quickly, something simple pulled from a closet full of clothes two years out of style, and went down to find the house transformed.

Fairy lights strung through the garden, staff moving through the crowd with trays, my parents holding court near the center of it all like they'd been born for exactly this.

My mother spotted me first and pulled me by the wrist into a loose orbit of relatives I hadn't seen since I'd left, rattling off introductions I only half absorbed. Cousins. An aunt. Someone's new husband.

And then Andrea, glowing in a pale gold dress, breaking off from a cluster of admirers the second she saw me.

"You're here!" She pulled me into a hug that smelled like champagne and expensive perfume. "I heard you slept through half the party, typical."

"Long flight," I said. "Long everything, honestly."

"Well, you're here now, that's what matters." She held me at arm's length, beaming, the picture of a woman whose life had gone exactly the way it was supposed to.

"Come on, you have to meet everyone properly. And you absolutely have to meet him."

"Him?"

"My fiancé." She said the word like it still tasted new and wonderful in her mouth. "You're going to love him, everyone does."

"What's his name?"

She turned, scanning the crowd until her eyes landed on someone across the garden, and her whole face softened the way it only ever did around something she was proud of.

"Victor Langford.”