Too Late, Mr. Ex: I Am A Billionaire's Wife

On my wedding day, my groom told me to smile for the guests while he took the bridal car to the airport to fetch his childhood sweetheart, so I smiled, and by the time he came back, I was married to his idol's son.

The sun was sitting right on top of the flower arch, and there wasn't a single patch of shade anywhere on that lawn.

I had been standing under that arch for one hour and thirty minutes. We weren't waiting for the officiant, and we weren't waiting for the rings. We were waiting for Lacey Dunn, because Trent had decided that his wedding could not start until his childhood sweetheart was sitting in the front row to watch it. I had found that out three days ago, and I had told myself it was sweet.

Sweat was running down my back under all that lace, and I could feel my makeup sliding at my hairline. The roses in my bouquet had started opening too fast in the heat. Every guest was fanning themselves with a programme by now, and the poor quartet was on its third round of the same four songs.

Trent stood three steps away from me with his back turned and his phone pressed to his ear.

"Don't cry," he said. "I'm right here, baby."

I listened to that soft voice and tried to remember the last time he had used it on me. I went back through five whole years, and I couldn't find a single time.

Then the wind dropped, and her voice came through his phone, thin and breathless, with that same little catch in it she always used when she wanted something. "Trent, the plane keeps shaking. We land in an hour and I feel so dizzy. I can't take a taxi alone. You know how I get."

"Don't worry about anything. I'm coming." He paused, and then, standing two steps from his bride in front of a hundred guests, he said it. "Love you, Lace."

A woman in the third row put her hand over her mouth.

Trent ended the call and turned around, and he didn't even bother to lower his voice. "Lacey's flight is late. She's landing alone and she isn't well. I have to go and get her."

For a second I honestly thought I had misheard him. "Now?" I said. "Trent, we are at the altar."

"You know what happened last time."

I did know. Last time she had fainted at the airport, and Trent had walked out of my birthday dinner to sit beside her hospital bed for twelve hours while the doctors ran every test they had and found nothing wrong with her at all. I had eaten my birthday cake alone at that restaurant table.

"It's an hour there and an hour back," I said. "She hasn't even landed yet. That's three hours, Trent."

He gave me the tired sigh he used on junior staff who asked too many questions. "You've waited five years. What's three more hours? Stop being so dramatic."

"We have postponed this wedding four times." I had expected my voice to shake, but it came out quiet and even, and that surprised me more than anything. "Four times, Trent. And every single time, it was for her."

"Because I made her a promise." He looked around at the guests while he said it, and he stood up a little straighter. "When we were ten, I promised Lacey she would watch me get married. I'm not breaking that promise because you're impatient and needy."

He had made me promises too. He had promised me this date, and the four dates before it. I wanted to say that out loud, but my throat had gone tight, so I just held on to my bouquet and said nothing.

"I'm the one paying for all of this," he said, glancing at his watch. "So let me decide how it goes."

He was paying for the flowers and the quartet and the cake that was slowly leaning to one side over by the hedge. I knew every one of those figures by heart, because I was the one who had sat up until two in the morning doing the budget while he slept.

In the front row, his mother nodded slowly under her wide lilac hat. "A good wife doesn't make her husband choose," Gloria said, and she made very sure the people around her heard it.

Trent smiled a little when he heard that. His mother was on his side, and that was all he had ever needed.

"Entertain the guests," he told me, and his voice carried right across the lawn. "Show my mother you can be a good wife. You've lived a hard life, Delia, so you know how to handle stress. Lacey is fragile. She needs me more than you do."

Somebody at the back gasped. Somebody else laughed, and then quickly stopped.

Trent reached out and touched my cheek with his thumb, and for one stupid second I thought he was going to say sorry. Then he looked down, saw my foundation on his thumb, and wiped it off on his trousers.

"And fix your face," he said, a little quieter. "If Lacey sees you sulking when we get back, she'll feel guilty." He pulled out his car keys. "Oh, and book her a table at Lumen for later. She'll be hungry after the flight. You know her order."

I did know her order. No onions, extra lemon, the sea bass and the small salad. I knew it because I had booked that table for her more than thirty times, and I had paid for eleven of them when Trent forgot his card.

A hard life.

Two years ago, Marshline had been about to lose the city transport contract. Trent went to bed angry that night and slammed the door, and I sat on the cold kitchen floor until four in the morning with my phone in my hand. In the end I called Mr. Graham, a kind old man who used to sneak me sweets at my father's parties when I was nine, and I asked him, very politely, to look at Marshline's proposal one more time. The contract came through on Monday. Trent climbed onto a chair in the office, popped champagne, and thanked his mother for raising him never to give up. When everyone had gone home, I got down on my knees and scrubbed the champagne out of the carpet.

He thought I was his secretary from some small flat somewhere. And I had let him think it, because for once in my life I wanted someone to love me without knowing what my father's name could buy.

Trent stepped past me and reached up to the arch over my head. He pulled down three white roses, the little wire snapped, and petals came falling onto my veil and my bare shoulders.

"She loves white roses," he said, tucking them under his arm. "Stay here. Smile."

Before I could find a single word to say back to him, a chair scraped on the stones.

Gloria had stood up. She had lived in my flat for three years, rent free, and when she phoned her friends she called me the girl, in the next room, with the door wide open so I could hear. She smoothed down her lilac dress with both hands, walked past me without even looking at me, and crossed the aisle to the bride's side.

My parents were sitting in the second row. My father had on a plain grey suit and no watch, and my mother wore a blue dress she had owned for ten years, with her little bag held on her lap in both hands. My brother Nolan sat beside them, his shirt still creased from his dawn flight in from Dubai. They looked ordinary, and that was exactly what I had begged them to do. Trent had never met them before today. Your low-class people can just show up on the day, he had always said, and I had laughed it off every single time.

Trent stopped halfway down the aisle with my roses under his arm, and he turned around to watch his mother. He didn't tell her to sit down.

At the very back of the lawn, beside the hedge, an old man in a grey suit was leaning on a cane. Everyone else had turned to look at Gloria, but he wasn't looking at her. He was looking at Trent, and he wasn't smiling.

Gloria stopped right in front of my mother and lifted one finger an inch from her face.

"You," she said, loud enough for the back rows to hear. "You absolute failure of a mother. You did not train your daughter well."