My mother didn’t blink. She didn’t flinch. She just looked at me with the bored expression of someone watching a dull television show. “You always make everything about you, Hannah. It’s your brother’s weekend. It’s Brandon’s big moment. Maybe it’s time you accepted your place.”
My Aunt Carol cackled from the doorway. She was leaning against the frame, a glass of Chardonnay in her hand despite it being barely eleven in the morning. Her teeth were stained slightly purple.
“She’s right, sweetie,” Carol slurred slightly, her eyes glittering with malice. “Honestly, maybe with a few holes in your dress, some desperate man might finally take pity on you. Might even find a date for the wedding, huh?”
They laughed together. It was a synchronized sound, a harmony of cruelty that I had listened to for twenty-six years. They laughed like I wasn’t even in the room. Like I was furniture. A prop in the main character’s life.
They didn’t know.
No one in that house—not my brother Brandon, the golden child; not my dad, who hid behind newspapers to avoid conflict; not the cousins; and certainly not Danielle, the high-maintenance bride-to-be—knew the one thing I’d kept hidden for over a year.
I was already married.
And not just married. I was secretly married to a man whose name appeared in financial journals they didn’t read and on buildings they couldn’t afford to enter. Nathaniel Ward. A billionaire who chose to stay out of the spotlight, largely by my choice.
I had wanted to protect our peace. I hadn’t wanted this toxic ecosystem of a family leeching off him the way they leeched off each other. I wanted one thing in my life that was pure, untouched by their judgment or their greed.
