Marry the Spare, Not the Heir

Marry the Spare, Not the Heir Chapter 1: The Debt The suitcase wheels caught on the marble seam by the staircase. Camila didn't stop to fix it. She kept walking, her fingers white around the handle. "Miss Camila." The housekeeper's voice came from behind her, careful, the way it always was when something in the house had gone wrong and no one wanted to be the one to say it out loud. Camila paused but didn't turn around. "You only just got home from the hospital. Where are you going now?" "Out," Camila said. It was the only word she trusted herself to say without her voice breaking. The housekeeper's gaze dropped to the suitcase, then lifted again, uncertain. "Should I call Mr. Diego? He said he'd be back by tonight." "Don't," Camila said. "Let him find out on his own." She pulled the suitcase toward the door. Her ribs still ached where the seatbelt had cut into her, but the pain in her chest was worse, and it had nothing to do with the accident. Flashback A week earlier, Camila had stood in front of a mirror in a boutique fitting room, turning slightly so the pale blue dress caught the light. It wasn't a wedding dress. Not yet. But it was close enough that her hands had trembled putting it on. "You look beautiful, Miss Reyes," the assistant said. Camila smiled at her own reflection, one hand resting lightly over her stomach. Six weeks. She hadn't told anyone yet except Diego, and even that had only been over the phone, quick and rushed, because he was always rushed. She dialed him again anyway. "Diego, are you almost here? I wanted you to see the dress before I buy it." "Something came up at the office," he said. "I can't make it tonight." Her smile faded, but she kept her voice light. "It's fine. Work is work." "I'll make it up to you," he said. "Go home, get some rest. I have a surprise for you when I'm back." That was enough to lift her spirits again. "A surprise?" "You'll see." She left the boutique with the dress folded carefully in its bag, laid across the passenger seat like something breakable. The sky had gone the color of a bruise, clouds thickening fast, and she thought about the baby the whole drive home, about how she would tell Diego's parents, about whether the wedding would finally have a date now instead of another year of waiting. She didn't see the truck until its headlights filled the mirror. The impact spun her twice before the car rolled. Metal folded around her like paper. When it stopped, she hung upside down against the seatbelt, blood already sliding warm down the side of her face, and the only thought that made it through the ringing in her ears was the baby. She got the belt open with shaking hands and dropped hard onto the crushed roof. Pain tore through her stomach in a way that told her, before her mind was ready to accept it, exactly what was happening. Her phone had landed somewhere near her knee. She found it by touch and called Diego. It rang twice before he picked up, his voice clipped. "I'm in a meeting." "Diego, there's been an accident, I'm bleeding, the baby, I think the baby, please, I need you to come, I need" "I'll call you back," he said, and the line went dead. She stared at the phone until the screen blurred. Somewhere close, a stranger's voice was shouting for help, and rain had started to fall, cold against the blood on her face, and the last thing Camila remembered was whispering his name into the wet road before everything went dark. End of flashback When she woke in the hospital, three days had passed. A nurse told her gently, the way people speak to something already broken, that she had lost the baby. Camila hadn't cried in front of the nurse. She had asked where Diego was instead, and the nurse said he had come, briefly, before being pulled away by an urgent call. She'd found him herself, eventually, in a corridor she wasn't supposed to wander into so soon after surgery. He wasn't alone. His hand was resting against the small of a woman's back, guiding her gently through a doorway, the two of them so close together that for a moment Camila didn't understand what she was looking at. She only saw the woman's dark hair, the curve of her shoulder leaning into him like she belonged there. Dizziness had taken her before she could get closer, and she woke up back in her room with no memory of how she'd gotten there, only the hollow certainty that something in her life had shifted and she hadn't yet been told what. Now, standing in the front hall with her suitcase and the ache still sharp beneath her ribs, Camila didn't know all of it yet. But she knew enough. She knew that a five year engagement should not still be waiting on a date. She knew that a man who loved her would have come running the moment she said the word bleeding. She knew that whoever the woman in that corridor was, Diego had looked at her the way he used to look at Camila, back when things were simple, back before the debt her father left behind became the quiet architecture holding her entire life in place. She opened the front door. Behind her, the housekeeper called out one more time, softer now. "Miss Camila, please. Wait for him." Camila didn't answer. She had spent five years waiting. She was done.