CHAPTER SEVEN: Mrs. Castellano

Sofia

The dress arrived two days before the wedding, delivered by a stylist I hadn’t hired, paid for by an account I hadn’t asked to be opened, in a box too elegant to belong to any closet I’d ever owned.

“Mr. Castellano wanted you to have options,” the stylist said, laying out three gowns across my childhood bed like she hadn’t noticed the peeling wallpaper or the water stain in the corner of the ceiling I’d been meaning to fix for two years. “He said to tell you there’s no obligation to choose any of these. He simply didn’t want cost to be the reason you settled for something you didn’t actually want.”

I chose the simplest one, a pale ivory dress with long sleeves and no beading, nothing that photographed as a statement, because some stubborn part of me refused to let this wedding look like anything other than what it actually was. A transaction. An arrangement. Not the kind of day a woman spent years imagining.

City hall on Saturday morning was smaller than I’d expected, quieter too, just my father, Marisol, Marcus, and a handful of board members whose names I promptly forgot the second I heard them. Damian wore a dark suit, no tie, and looked at me when I walked in with an expression I couldn’t entirely read, something between relief and a hunger he was working very hard to keep contained behind the practiced calm he wore like armor.

“You look like you’re about to deliver a eulogy,” I murmured, once we were standing close enough that only he could hear it.

“I was told the correct expression was supposed to be adoration. I’m attempting it.”

“You’re failing.”

“I’m aware.” The corner of his mouth moved, almost a real smile. “Give me a moment. I’ve had considerably more practice closing acquisitions than I have getting married.”

“Is that what this is to you. An acquisition.”

He didn’t answer right away, and in the pause I watched something flicker across his face that looked, for half a second, like it cost him something to hold back. “No,” he said finally, low enough that it felt like it was meant only for me. “This is the first thing I’ve built in twelve years that I actually want to keep.”

I didn’t have a response for that, and the officiant, mercifully, chose that exact moment to begin.

The ceremony itself passed in a blur of vows neither of us had written ourselves, borrowed language that somehow still landed harder than I expected when Damian said them looking directly at me instead of over my shoulder at the small gathered crowd the way I’d assumed he would. When he slid the ring onto my finger, his hands were steady. Mine weren’t.

“You may kiss the bride,” the officiant said, and for one suspended second neither of us moved, both of us apparently unprepared for the part of this performance that required actual contact.

Then Damian’s hand found my jaw, gentle, careful, like he was asking permission even as he closed the distance, and kissed me in front of a room full of strangers in a way that felt, terrifyingly, like it wasn’t entirely for show. His thumb brushed once along my cheekbone, so slight I doubted anyone else in the room had noticed it at all, and for the length of that single breath I forgot entirely that this was supposed to be a performance.

It lasted three seconds. It felt considerably longer than that, long enough that when he pulled back I had to remind myself to breathe, long enough that Marcus’s eyebrows had climbed somewhere near his hairline, long enough that my father’s face had gone carefully, deliberately blank in a way that told me he’d noticed something neither of us had meant to reveal.

“Mrs. Castellano,” Damian said quietly, testing the name like he wanted to see how it sat in his mouth.

“Don’t get used to it,” I said, though my voice came out considerably less steady than I wanted. “Eighteen months, remember.”

“I remember.” Something in his eyes, when he said it, didn’t quite match the certainty of his voice. “I remember every single detail of this arrangement, Sofia. That’s precisely the problem.”

I didn’t have time to ask what he meant before Marcus was ushering us toward photographs, and board members were extending congratulations I didn’t deserve, and somewhere in the chaos of becoming Mrs. Castellano in front of a room full of people who believed this marriage was real, I lost the thread of whatever honest thing Damian had almost told me, and spent the rest of the evening wondering exactly what it had been.

The photographs took nearly an hour, Damian’s hand resting at the small of my back the entire time, steady and warm in a way that made it difficult to remember this was supposed to be strategy rather than affection. Board members I’d never met shook my hand and called me a wonderful surprise, a few of them openly relieved, as though Damian’s settling down had lifted some private concern they’d been carrying about him for years. One older woman, introduced to me only as Elaine, held onto my hand a beat longer than necessary.

“He’s been alone a very long time,” she said quietly, glancing toward where Damian stood speaking with Marcus a few feet away. “Whatever this is, dear, I hope it’s real. He deserves for it to be real.”

I didn’t know how to answer that, so I simply smiled and let her walk away believing whatever comforted her most, and spent the rest of the dinner trying not to notice how often Damian’s eyes found mine across the table, like he was checking, again and again, that I hadn’t quietly disappeared.

Later, in the car on the way back from city hall, the first real quiet we’d had all day settled between us, both of us still dressed for a performance that had somehow felt, in moments, like something closer to true. Damian loosened his collar and looked out the window at the city sliding past, and for a long time neither of us said anything at all.

“Thank you,” he said eventually, without turning from the window. “For today. I know none of it was easy, and I know I haven’t made it easier by explaining as little as I have.”

“You’re allowed to just say thank you, Damian. You don’t have to apologize every time you say something kind.”

“I’m aware. I’m still learning which parts of this arrangement require an apology and which parts are simply decent behavior.” He turned to look at me then, something unguarded in his expression that I hadn’t seen since the moment right before he’d kissed me. “You did something remarkable in there tonight. I watched an entire board fall for you within twenty minutes, and I understood completely why they did.”

I didn’t have a response for that, not one that wouldn’t have revealed considerably more than I was ready to admit, so I looked out my own window instead and let the silence carry us the rest of the way home, both of us very carefully not naming whatever had just passed between us in the back of that car.

When we reached the house, Damian walked me to my door the way he might have on an ordinary first date, an odd formality given everything we’d already signed our names to, and paused there with his hand resting lightly on the frame.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “today didn’t feel entirely like a performance to me. I don’t know what to do with that yet, but I thought you should know I noticed it too.”

“Damian.”

“You don’t have to say anything back. I just didn’t want to be the only one carrying it tonight.” He stepped back before I could decide how to respond, something careful and deliberate in the distance he put between us. “Goodnight, Sofia. Sleep well, in whatever bed takes you longest to get used to.”

I stood in the doorway long after he’d disappeared down the hall, replaying the particular softness in his voice when he’d said it, and told myself, unconvincingly, that it meant nothing at all.