The Forgotten Billionaire's Wife

Chapter Three

AMELIA

It rained the morning of my wedding.

Not the dramatic, cinematic kind of rain that feels like the weather is trying to tell you something. Just the flat, grey, unremarkable kind that turns the streets dark and makes everything smell like wet concrete. I stood at the window of the hotel room Mrs. Haydere had arranged for me the night before — because it was bad luck to see the groom before the ceremony, she had said, and I had thought, I think we are well past worrying about luck — and watched it streak down the glass and tried to locate, somewhere inside me, the appropriate feelings for the occasion.

I couldn't find them. I found other things instead. A low, persistent nervousness that had been living behind my sternum for two weeks. A strange, detached calm sitting on top of it like a lid. And underneath both of those, something I didn't examine too closely because I was fairly certain it was grief, and I didn't have time for grief this morning.

My cousin Priya did my hair. She was the only person I had told anything close to the truth to, not all of it, but enough. She had sat with me in my kitchen three weeks ago and said, very carefully, Amelia, you don't have to do this, and I had said, I know.

Now she was pinning my hair up in the hotel mirror and not saying anything, which was the kindest thing she could have done.

"You look beautiful," she said, when she was finished.

"Thank you," I said.

"How do you feel?"

I looked at myself in the mirror. The ivory dress was my mother's choice, not mine — floor length, simple, with a neckline that she said was elegant and I said was conservative and we had agreed, eventually, to call classic. My hair was up. My earrings were small pearl drops that had belonged to my grandmother. I looked, I thought, like someone dressed for someone else's wedding.

"I feel fine," I said.

Priya met my eyes in the mirror and did not say what she was thinking. I loved her for that.

~

The ceremony was at a chapel attached to a hotel that the Hayderes used for events. It was beautiful; immaculately maintained, heavy with flowers, full of people in good coats. My side was smaller. My parents were in the front row, my father in his best suit that I had quietly had dry-cleaned the week before, my mother with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes bright in a way that was trying very hard to look like happiness.

I walked down the aisle on my father's arm.

I have tried, since then, to remember exactly what I felt during those seconds. The music. The faces turning. The aisle carpet under my heels. Mostly what I remember is keeping my chin level, because I had decided that morning that whatever else this day was, it was not going to be a day where I looked down.

Alexander was standing at the altar in a charcoal suit that fit him. His hands were clasped in front of him.

He looked at me when I reached him. Not through me, not past me. At me. For a full three seconds, he actually looked at me.

Then he looked at the officiant.

"You look nice," he said, very quietly, from the side of his mouth.

I blinked.

"Thank you," I said, equally quietly.

The officiant cleared his throat.

We said our vows. His voice was even and clear and correct, every word in the right place, like a man reading from a document he had memorised. I said mine and I meant them; I had stood in my bathroom the night before and read them out loud three times and decided I was going to mean them, because if I was doing this then I was doing it properly, and I was not the kind of woman who made promises she intended to keep only partially.

When it was done, he lifted my veil and kissed me once, briefly, on the mouth.

His lips were warm. He smelled like cedar and something expensive. He pulled back and looked at me again with that same expression, and I thought, in the half second before someone started clapping; he's not here. Whoever he is when he's actually present, that person is somewhere else entirely right now.

I smiled for the photographs anyway.

ALEXANDER

I wrote the date in my phone that morning like a meeting. November 14. 2pm. Chapel.

That was what it was. A meeting. A transaction being formally completed. I had been telling myself this for two months and I was very good at it by now, most of the time.

The one moment it slipped was in the car on the way there, when my father sat beside me and put his hand briefly on my shoulder and said, "She's a good woman, Alexander. Don't make the mistake of not seeing that."

I looked out the window.

"I'll keep that in mind," I said.

He removed his hand. We didn't speak again until we arrived.

I stood at the altar for eleven minutes before she appeared, because I had arrived early — I arrive early for everything, it is the one compulsive habit I have never been able to break — and I stood there while the guests found their seats and the string quartet played and I thought about what came after this. The structure of it. The practicalities. Where we would each exist within the estate. How two people who did not know each other could share a house large enough to make the not knowing each other bearable?

I did not think about Isabelle. I had made a decision not to think about Isabelle today, and I was enforcing it.

Then the music changed.

And Amelia came through the doors at the end of the aisle on her father's arm, and I — I don't know what I expected. I had seen her twice. I knew what she looked like. But there was something different about her right now that I couldn't immediately categorise. She was walking like she owned the ground she was covering. Chin level. Shoulders back. Eyes forward and steady, not darting around the room looking for reassurance the way I had watched other people do at weddings.

I found myself thinking, involuntarily, that it was one of the more composed things I had ever watched a person do.

She reached me. I said she looked nice. It was an inadequate thing to say and I knew that and I said it anyway, because it was true and I didn't have anything better available.

She said thank you, and looked at the officiant, and that was that.

I said my vows correctly. She said hers like she meant them, which she apparently did, and which made me feel, quietly and inconveniently, like something was sitting in my chest that had no right to be there.

I kissed her once because it was required. Her hand was cold in mine.

In the photographs afterward she smiled like she'd been smiling at cameras her whole life. Easy and genuine-looking and warm. I stood beside her and did the thing my mother had taught me at eleven — not a grimace, Alexander, just lift the corners slightly — and tried not to notice that Amelia's smile reached her eyes and mine didn't.

The reception went well. Food, speeches, dancing. My mother cried pleasantly during my father's toast, which she does at every emotional occasion and had clearly been saving up for. Amelia's father said something short and lovely about her recipe book that made several people reach for their napkins.

Amelia laughed at something her cousin said at the table, a real laugh, sudden and unguarded, and I noticed because it was the first real thing I had heard from her all day.

We danced once, because it was expected. She was a better dancer than I anticipated, or maybe she was just good at following, which in my experience amounted to the same thing on a dance floor.

"Are you alright?" she asked, while we were dancing. Just that. Quietly, without looking up at me.

I looked down at the top of her head.

"Fine," I said.

"You don't have to be," she said. "Alright, I mean. Not with me. I'm not going to — I'm not asking to talk about it. I just meant you don't have to perform it."

I didn't answer for a moment.

"Likewise," I said, eventually.

She did look up then. Just briefly.

"I'm not performing," she said. And the way she said it was so matter-of-fact, so completely without self-pity, that I believed her immediately.

That sat in my chest too.

I was going to have to be more careful.

~

The car ride back to the estate was quiet.

Amelia sat on her side of the back seat with her hands in her lap and her bouquet resting against the door. She had taken her hair down somewhere between the reception and the car, and it was loose around her shoulders now, and she was looking out the window at the city going by.

I was looking at my phone.

There was a message from Isabelle. Sent an hour ago.

How does it feel, husband?

I stared at it for a second.

Fine, I typed back. We'll talk tomorrow.

I locked the phone and put it in my pocket and looked straight ahead.

Beside me, Amelia said nothing. She just kept looking out the window, and I thought she hadn't seen, and I was grateful for that.

What I didn't know — what I wouldn't find out until much later — was that she had seen the screen reflected in the window glass the moment the message came through.

She had read every word.