All Chapters of I Don't Want a Secondhand Marriage: Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

Wendy's POVI felt like I could barely breathe.Back in the room, I tore off my wedding dress and pulled the veil from my hair. When Zach Lewis walked in and saw me, he froze."Wendy, why aren't you dressed? They said we can start the wedding soon."I was already frantically wiping off my makeup."Cancel it."His phone rang before he heard me.All through the delay, I'd been afraid someone would suddenly tell us it was time to start, so I'd kept touching up my makeup, still hoping Zach and I could have a beautiful wedding to remember.Then I'd looked out the window and seen his car pull up. I thought everything had finally been sorted out.Worried that my parents might give him a hard time, I'd even gone downstairs specifically to tell him what to say. On the way, I was still rehearsing the best way to explain things while trying to convince my parents not to be too upset with him. After all, I'd thought the delay was beyond his control.I never imagined all that effort had been for t

Zach gripped my shoulders, his tone softening."I'll make this up to you. You're a designer. Coming up with another design shouldn't be that hard for you. "Come on, enough. I admit I handled the wedding badly. Zoe suddenly decided she wanted to know what it felt like to have one, and I couldn't exactly refuse her. I figured I could get away with keeping it from you. We can always have ours another day."We had been together for five years. After five years together, we'd even had our charts read, and both families had helped us settle on what was supposed to be the perfect wedding date. Yet he had thrown it all aside that easily for a reason like that.With that, he left.My parents were still outside, so I swallowed the bitterness and forced myself to set the whole thing aside for the moment.When I reached the restaurant, the last person I expected to see was Zach.He and Zoe were in a corner of the hallway, and I couldn't tell what they were doing. Zach stood protectively beside he

The way Mia addressed him caught Zach off guard. He stared at her for a second, then turned on me."Wendy, seriously? Whatever's going on between us, did you really have to involve a child?"There it was. Even now, he didn't think he'd done anything wrong.He had taken Zoe's word without question over that of a little girl he'd known for years, and he hadn't even been willing to check the security footage to give Mia a chance to prove herself. There was no point arguing with someone like that.I sent Mia back to her room before facing him again. "That was her decision, Zach. She gets to choose who she wants to be close to. I'm not going to tell her how she has to feel about you.""Fine. Fine." His jaw tightened. "I was trying to teach her a lesson, and now your whole family wants to act like I'm some kind of enemy?"The sheer nerve of it almost made me laugh."Mia has parents. She has grandparents. She has me, her aunt. She has plenty of family to teach her right from wrong. She doesn'

The more Zach replayed everything in his head, the more he regretted what he'd done, and the incident at the restaurant was no exception.Zoe had been the one to call him over that day. He hadn't thought much of it until he arrived and found her arguing with Mia. Without stopping to question what had happened, he'd taken Zoe's side and demanded an apology.Looking back, he knew better. He hadn't been around for Mia's entire childhood, but he'd known her for years and had a good sense of what kind of kid she was. He should have heard her out. At the very least, he should have checked the security footage before deciding she was guilty and using the house to force her family into submission.What bothered him most was the look on Wendy's father, Thomas Miller's, face that day. Thomas had spent his life as a proud, dignified teacher, and that small villa was the only old family home they had left. Zach had pushed him so far that he'd barely been able to speak, fumbling for his medicine

After that, Zach finally stopped showing up to bother me. His company was in enough trouble to consume all his attention."How the hell did this happen?" he snapped as one problem after another surfaced.Once again, he needed money, only this time the shortfall was far larger than before.To make matters worse, the house he owned was legally in Zoe's name.When Zoe had first moved to the city, she'd had trouble establishing residency, so Zach had temporarily put the house in her name to help her. Now that he desperately needed an asset he could borrow against, he discovered he effectively had nothing.He didn't want anything more to do with Zoe, but desperation left him no choice."Transfer my house back to me."Zoe refused."You put it in my name. That makes it mine. I can do whatever I want with it, so don't act like I'm supposed to 'give it back.'"Zach was furious. "I never gave you that house. I put it in your name to help with your residency. We agreed you'd transfer it back afte