Beautiful Lies

Chapter 4: The Annoucement

Three weeks had passed before Nana called again.

Not that Eva forgot him entirely. Every so often while folding laundry, or waiting on a client callback, Ethan’s face would surface without warning. She’d remember the way he’d looked at her over the rim of his water glass, that unreadable stillness and how she had felt small, guilty flicker before pushing it back down where it belonged. She loved Jayden. She wasn’t the kind of person who let a stranger take up space he hadn’t earned. Still, the thoughts came anyway, uninvited, and she noticed herself noticing them.

Life had otherwise gone on the way it always did. Clients, deadlines, evenings with Jayden that folded easily back into their old rhythm, the account scare from that first night had already become a story they laughed about.

Then Nana called, and something in her voice sounded different from the moment Eva picked up.

“Family dinner. This one’s important, Eva.” A pause, brief but deliberate. “Wear the green. And don’t be late.”

Eva stood a little straighter without meaning to. Nana rarely used the word important. She used lovely and special and just family, soft words that meant whatever she wanted them to mean. Important was new.

The house was full when she arrived. More cars in the driveway than she’d seen in years, voices spilling out from the sitting room before she’d even reached the door.

Eva stood in the doorway a second too long, taking it in. Aunties she saw twice a year. A cousin from Sacramento who never came down for anything smaller than a funeral or a wedding. Two men in suits she didn’t recognize, standing near the fireplace with the particular stillness of people who worked for someone rather than knew them, drinks untouched, eyes tracking the room instead of joining it.

Something cold moved through her stomach before she could name why.

“Eva,” An aunt caught her arm, air-kissed both cheeks, already pulling her toward the noise. “Look at you. Nana said you’d been busy.”

“Busy, yeah.” Eva scanned the room over her shoulder, searching. She found Ethan near the window, glass in hand, untouched.

Why is he even here? This was family. Aunties, cousins, an uncle who couldn’t find California on a map without help. Not the CEO of Vale Corporations, standing by the window like he’d been placed there on purpose.

He looked up at the same moment, and for the first time she had met him, he looked away first.

That, more than anything, made her pulse pick up.

Nana found her a moment later, pressing a kiss to her cheek that lasted a fraction too long, her hand lingering on Eva’s shoulder the way it did when she was steadying herself as much as anyone else.

“You look beautiful,” Nana said “Green suits you.”

“Nana, why is everyone here? You said family dinner. This is…” Eva gestured at the room, at the caterers moving quietly along the walls, at her uncle already deep in conversation with one of the unfamiliar men. “This is a lot for a Tuesday.”

“It’s a special occasion.” Nana’s smile didn’t waver, but something behind her eyes flickered, gone before Eva could hold onto it. “Go find your seat, darling. We’ll talk properly at dinner.”

Dinner was too formal for a Tuesday. The good china. Place cards, handwritten, Nana’s looping script spelling out names Eva hadn’t seen together at one table since she was a teenager. She sat where her card told her to. It was beside an uncle who talked at length about golf, across from Ethan, who said almost nothing and ate even less.

Eva’s fork moved food around her plate without much of it reaching her mouth. Her knee bounced under the table until she made herself stop it. Something was coming. She could feel it in the too-careful way everyone avoided certain topics, in the way Nana kept glancing at the head of the table like she was counting down to something, in the way Ethan’s jaw stayed tight through an entire conversation about someone’s golf handicap, in the way those two men by the fireplace had migrated to seats near the back wall instead of the table at all, watching rather than eating.

Once, their eyes caught across the table. He held her gaze for exactly one second, then looked down at his plate like it had personally offended him.

By the time the plates were cleared, the room had gone quiet in a way large rooms full of family rarely did.

Nana stood.

She tapped her glass once, twice, the sound thin and bright against the silence, and the whole table turned toward her like they had been told to expect this.

“I wanted everyone here tonight,” Nana said, “because some things deserve to be in front of family, not whispered over phone calls.”

Eva’s stomach dropped before the sentence even finished. Her hands went cold around her napkin.

“Eva.” Nana’s eyes found her down the length of the table, warm, unwavering, terrifyingly certain. “I’ve arranged your marriage to Ethan Vale.”

The room didn’t gasp so much as inhale, all at once, a single held breath. Somewhere down the table, a fork clinked against a plate.

Eva heard the words land, hears them repeated somewhere behind her ribs, and for a second none of it made sense. The syllables were English, she understood every one of them individually, but strung together they refused to become a sentence her body could accept.

“What?” Her own voice sounded far away, thin, someone else’s.

“It’s already settled, darling. The families have discussed it. Ethan’s father and I…”

“You arranged it?” Eva’s chair scraped back hard against the floor, loud enough that two aunts flinched. Her ears were ringing, a high thin sound underneath everything, and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking no matter how tightly she pressed them flat against the table. “Like I’m… like this is some kind of…Nana, I’m a person. Not a merger.”

“Eva, sit down. Let’s discuss this properly…”

“There’s nothing to discuss. You didn’t ask me.” Eva’s voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it, hated that even her own throat was betraying her in front of all these people. Her eyes swept the table, every familiar face gone strange and distant, an uncle’s fork frozen halfway to his mouth, an aunt’s hand pressed flat against her own chest – and landed last on Ethan, who was watching her with something unreadable and terrible in his expression, something that might have been guilty if she’d had any patience left to look for it.

She didn’t wait to find out.

She was already moving, chair still rocking behind her, with her heels loud against the floor, out through the hallway and past the housekeeper’s startled face by the front door into the cold night air before anyone at the table could say another word.