Scared

She knew that face. She had seen it in photographs dozens of times, at family dinners she had not been invited to, in the social column of the city's business papers, in the background of her sister's phone screen when her sister had still been speaking to her. She knew the hard, clean lines of that jaw, the sharp authority of those dark eyes, the kind of face that rooms reorganized themselves around.

Caleb Wren.

Her sister's fiancé.

He looked nothing like the composed, controlled man she had seen in those photographs. His shirt was partially undone. His hair was dishevelled. And his eyes — his eyes were red. Not from crying. From drinking. From hours of it, she could tell from the way he carried his own weight, the slight unsteadiness in his stillness, the bottle sitting open on the table beside him.

He looked at her.

And the grief on his face curdled into something else.

"Caleb—" she started.

He crossed the room in four strides.

She didn't have time to step back. His hand closed in her hair and the force of it knocked the air from her lungs as he pulled, sharp and without mercy, driving her downward until her knees hit the floor hard. The pain was immediate and bright. She grabbed instinctively at his wrist, gasping.

"You." His voice was gravel and ruin. Low and shaking with something that was not entirely rage and not entirely grief but some terrible combination of both. He looked down at her with those red-rimmed eyes and she saw years of something dark living behind them. "You have the nerve to stand in my house and beg."

"Caleb, please — you're hurting me—"

"Hurting you." He laughed, and it was the worst sound she had ever heard a person make. "Tell me about being hurt, Nora. Tell me what it looks like."

She was trembling. Her knees burned against the hard floor. She had her hands wrapped around his wrist but she was not strong enough — not nearly strong enough, and so she simply held on, as though that might anchor her to something solid.

"This is a mistake," she whispered. Tears were coming now and she couldn't stop them. "Whatever you think I did — it's a mistake—"

"You put her in that chair." His grip tightened. "You did that."

"I didn't—"

The word came out broken, cracking down the middle, and she hated herself for it. She had said those words so many times in the past weeks that they had begun to feel worn through — threadbare, unconvincing even to her own ears though she knew with every part of herself that they were true.

Her sister, Lena. Beautiful, careless, brilliant Lena, who had always moved through the world as though it had been built expressly for her. Who had been drunk the night of the accident — Nora knew it, had known it, had called her and begged her not to get in the car — and who had wrapped her vehicle around a barrier on the motorway overpass at sixty miles an hour.

The accident had left her paralysed from the waist down.

And Lena, who had never in her life accepted a consequence as her own, had looked at the ruins of everything — her mobility, her wedding, her carefully constructed future — and had decided that Nora was the cause of it. She had said so to anyone who would listen. She had said it to their mother. She had said it to her friends. She had said it to Caleb.

And then she had disappeared.

Gone. Without a word to Nora. Without allowing her so much as a moment to defend herself, leaving only the wreckage of her accusations and a fiancé mad with grief and alcohol standing over Nora in a cold room with his hand in her hair.

"I called her that night," Nora said. Her voice was very quiet now. She was past screaming. "I told her not to drive. I begged her, Caleb. She didn't listen to me — she never listened to me — and I have spent every single day since then living with what happened and being blamed for something I—"

"Enough."

His voice was absolute. A door slamming shut.

He released her hair and Nora caught herself on her hands, pressing her palms flat against the floor. She stayed there for a moment, breathing. Her scalp ached. Her knees throbbed. Around her the room was very still, just the fire being the only thing moving, casting long amber shadows across the walls.

Caleb stepped back. He reached for the bottle on the table without looking at it and drank without a glass. This was so unlike him and Nora trembled like leaves on a windy day.

He looked at her on the floor.

Something shifted in his expression like a decision being made behind those ruined eyes. Final and immovable.

"You're not going home," he said.

Nora looked up at him. "What?"

"Lena is gone." He said it flatly, as though reporting the weather. "The wedding is in four days. Everything is arranged. The families are expecting it. The contracts are signed." He set the bottle down. "You look exactly like her. Anyone who doesn't know you well enough would never know the difference."

The room seemed to tilt.

"You're going to take her place," Caleb said. "You're going to stand where she was supposed to stand, and you're going to carry the weight of what you took from me." His gaze moved over her with the cold appraisal of a man who had decided that a problem had a solution and was simply identifying the pieces. "Consider it what you owe."

"You're out of your mind," Nora breathed.

"Probably." He didn't flinch. "It doesn't change anything."

Nora pushed herself to her feet. Her legs were unsteady but she stood, and she lifted her chin, looking at the man she had once — a very long time ago considered one of the only people in the world who truly knew her.

She had been thirteen when she pulled him from the lake. A summer afternoon, a dare gone wrong, and Caleb Wren sinking beneath dark water while everyone else stood frozen on the bank. She had not thought about it. She had simply gone in.

He had looked at her afterward with something in his eyes that she had spent years trying to describe to herself. Seen, she had always settled on. He had looked at her like he truly saw her.

Her sister had told the story differently. Had placed herself on the bank. Had turned a moment of pure instinct into a romantic gesture, retelling it so many times and so convincingly that even Caleb had come to remember it that way — remembered it with Lena's name attached to it, with Lena's face in the water.

And Nora, who had never known how to fight for the things that were hers, had let it go.

She was looking at what that silence had cost her.

"I didn't cause the accident," she said, one final time. Not begging. Just true. "I didn't. And somewhere underneath all of that grief and that whiskey, I think you know it."

Caleb Wren said nothing.

He turned back to the window, and the firelight made a shadow of him. Nora stood in the center of his cold, beautiful room and understood, with a clarity that was almost calm, that no one was coming for her.

She was completely alone.

And in four days, if she could not find a way out of this, she was going to be his bride.