Chapter 4: The Aisle

Victoria’s wedding dress was a little over my size.

Not by much. An inch maybe, less even. But I felt it the moment my mother finished fastening the back, the way the bodice sat slightly loose against my ribs like the dress itself knew it was on the wrong person and was quietly refusing to cooperate.

“Stand still,” my mother said from behind me.

“I am standing still.”

“You’re breathing too hard. It’s making the fabric shift.”

“Mom, I’m nervous. Breathing is what happens when you’re nervous.”

She didn’t answer that. She made two small adjustments near my waist and stepped back and looked at me in the mirror.

I looked at myself too.

The dress was beautiful. Of course it was. Victoria had spent four months choosing it, three fittings, two designers consulted before she finally settled on this one. Ivory silk, long and clean, with a low open back and small pearl buttons running from the base of my spine all the way up to my shoulders. On Victoria it would have looked like something out of a magazine.

On me it looked like a costume.

“It fits well enough,” my mother said.

“It fits like it belongs to someone else,” I said.

“Charlotte.”

“I’m just being honest.”

She came to stand beside me in the mirror. Neither of us said anything for a moment. She looked at my reflection and I looked at hers and I thought about all the mornings I had stood in front of mirrors in this house and never once felt like the most important person in the room. Not even close.

Today was not going to be different.

“Your hair,” she said finally.

“What about it?”

“Victoria was going to wear it up. You should do the same.” She reached for a pin on the vanity. “It will look more intentional.”

“More intentional,” I repeated quietly. “Right.”

She began pinning my hair up with the kind of focus she got when she was trying not to feel anything. I recognised that mode. She had used it at my grandmother’s funeral. She had used it the day my father’s company lost a major deal three years ago. Margaret Whitmore managed difficult things by keeping her hands busy.

“Has Dad spoken to Damien yet?” I asked.

“He called Lucas Sterling first. Damien’s lawyer. Lucas is handling the communication on that side.”

“So Damien knows.”

“He knows enough.”

“What does that even mean?”

Her hands paused briefly on my hair. Just for a second. “It means the situation has been communicated and he has not called anything off.”

I looked at her in the mirror. “He hasn’t called it off or he just hasn’t responded yet?”

“He hasn’t called it off,” she said, and her voice had that firmness that meant the conversation was done. “That is all that matters right now.”

It wasn't all that mattered. It wasn’t even close to all that mattered. But I could see from her face that this was the last we were going to talk about it before I walked out that door so I let it go.

I looked back at my own reflection.

Green eyes. Chestnut hair going up pin by pin. A dress that almost fit. A face that was mine and nobody else’s and that was going to have to be enough.

She put the last pin in and stepped back.

My father was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

He looked up when he heard me coming and something moved across his face that I hadn’t seen on him before. Not pride exactly. More like relief mixed with something else he wasn’t going to put a name to out loud.

“You look—”

“Don’t,” I said.

He closed his mouth.

I reached the bottom step and stopped. “Has he said anything? Damien. Has he actually said anything directly?”

“Lucas relayed that he understands the situation and the ceremony will proceed as planned.”

“That’s it? The ceremony will proceed as planned?”

“Yes.”

I took that in for a moment. “He didn’t ask any questions? He didn’t want to know anything about me at all?”

My father’s expression told me everything before he even opened his mouth. “He is a practical man Charlotte. He made a practical decision.”

Practical.

I was a practical decision.

I picked up the small bouquet my mother had pressed into my hands at some point, white roses that still smelled too strongly of Victoria’s perfume, straightened my shoulders and looked at my father.

“Let’s go,” I said.

The walk from the estate to the garden wasn’t long.

It felt long.

My father took my arm and we walked the path laid out with white petals and low arrangements of greenery and I kept my eyes straight ahead because if I looked sideways I could already see guests seated in their rows and I was not ready for that. Not yet.

I could hear the low murmur of the crowd. The string quartet playing something soft and slow. The sound of a hundred conversations that were about to stop the moment I appeared.

Then the music shifted.

Something slower. Something that meant it was time.

My father’s arm tightened slightly against mine. Not warmly. Just steadying. Like he was making sure I didn’t stop walking.

I didn’t stop walking.

The guests stood.

I kept my eyes on the end of the aisle. On the arch I had watched the florists argue over all morning, now finished and perfect and holding still in the afternoon air. On the officiant standing beneath it.

And on the man standing in front of it.

Damien Blackwood.

I had seen photographs. I genuinely thought I was prepared.

I was not prepared.

He was tall in photographs. In person he was something else entirely. Six feet three of absolute stillness, dark suit, dark hair, the kind of presence that made every other man nearby seem somehow smaller without anything being said. He stood with his hands folded in front of him and he did not move and he did not smile and he watched me walk toward him with an expression I could not read from twenty feet away.

I kept walking.

Ten feet.

His eyes were blue. I could see that now. Sharp and pale and giving absolutely nothing away, watching me come toward him with an intensity that made the back of my neck feel warm even in the open air.

He knew I wasn't Victoria.

Of course he knew. Someone had told him. And yet he was standing there. Still. Waiting. Like he had already made his decision and was simply seeing it through.

Five feet.

I reached the end of the aisle and my father placed my hand forward and I felt the exact moment my fingers were no longer holding his arm and I was standing alone in front of Damien Blackwood with two hundred people watching and the string quartet playing something I already knew I would never be able to remember the name of.

Damien looked at me.

I looked at him.

Three full seconds where neither of us moved or spoke or acknowledged the thousand things that were wrong about this moment.

Then he reached out and took my hand.

His grip was firm. Not gentle exactly, not rough either. Just certain. Like a man who had made up his mind and wasn’t going back on it.

I let him take it.

The ceremony wasn’t long.

I heard the words the officiant spoke and I said the ones I was supposed to say and I heard Damien say his in a voice that was low and clear and completely composed, like a man signing something important, like a man who had prepared for exactly this regardless of who ended up standing across from him.

I did not cry.

I had been afraid I might. Not from emotion exactly but from the heavy weight of it, standing in my sister’s dress in front of my sister’s guests marrying my sister’s fiancé because my sister had chosen herself and left the rest of us to figure out what came next.

But I didn’t cry.

I stood straight and said the words and when the ring went on my finger I looked down at it for just a second. Simple and platinum and somehow a perfect fit, because of course it was, the universe had a very particular sense of humour today.

“You may kiss the bride.”

I looked up.

Damien was already looking at me with that same unreadable expression. He took one small step forward. Close enough now that I could see the precise line of his jaw, the way his eyes moved carefully over my face with something that wasn’t warmth and wasn’t coldness but something controlled and deliberate sitting right between the two.

He leaned In and pressed his lips to my cheek.

Not my mouth. My cheek.

Brief. Formal. The kind of gesture that said everything about what this was and nothing at all about what it wasn’t.

The guests applauded.

I kept my face still.

Damien straightened and looked at me again and for just a fraction of a second something moved behind those blue eyes that I couldn’t identify before it was gone completely.

Then he offered me his arm.

I took it.

We walked back down the aisle together, two hundred people watching, music playing, flowers everywhere, and I was Mrs. Blackwood, I was actually Mrs. Blackwood, and I felt absolutely nothing like a bride.

I felt like a substitute.

I felt like someone who had spent her whole life being second and had just made it permanent.

And the man whose arm I was holding had not said a single word to me.

Not one word.

Not yet.