Two Years to Forever

CHAPTER FIVE

My mother arrived forty minutes before the ceremony, and I heard about it from Lisa before I saw her myself, because I was upstairs in a hotel suite being sewn into a dress I'd chosen for exactly nobody's approval but my own.

"She's here," Lisa said, poking her head in, pins still between her lips from adjusting my hem. "And she looks like a woman who drove two hours composing a speech."

"Wonderful."

"She also brought your father. And a fruit cake. I don't know what to make of the fruit cake."

I laughed at myself, the first real laugh I'd managed in days, and it steadied something in my chest that had been shaking since I woke up that morning in a hotel room that wasn't mine, about to marry a man for reasons that had nothing to do with love and everything to do with arithmetic.

My mother found me twenty minutes later, and the first thing she did was stand in the doorway and simply look at me for a long moment, taking in the dress, the room, the whole strange shape of a wedding day she'd learned about from a stranger's phone.

"You look beautiful," she said finally, which wasn't what I'd braced for.

"Mum—"

"I'm still angry with you." She came in any way, closing the door behind her, her eyes bright in a way that made my own throat tighten immediately. "Eight years I watched you carry that boy around like a wound you refused to let heal, and then you married him without a single word to me first. I found out from Carol's daughter's i********:, Isabel. Carol. Whose daughter I don't even like."

"I know. I'm sorry. I didn't know how to explain it without explaining all of it, and I wasn't ready to say any of it out loud yet."

"Then explain it now. We have twenty minutes, and I'm not leaving this room until I understand at least part of why my daughter is marrying a man she hasn't mentioned in eight years."

So I told her, or a version of it anyway, the practical shape of it, if not every private corner: the business, the money, the contract, the two years. I watched her face move through several things at once, worry and disbelief and something that might have been reluctant respect for the sheer nerve of the whole arrangement.

"And do you still love him?" she said when I'd finished. Not a question dressed as a statement. An actual question, direct in the way only your mother can ask something and expect the truth back.

I opened my mouth to say no, clean and simple, the answer that made the whole arrangement bearable.

What came out instead was, "I don't know anymore"

My mother's face softened in a way I hadn't seen since I was a child. "Well," she said, reaching to fix a piece of hair I hadn't realized had come loose. "You just have to go through this.”

She hugged me then, careful of the dress, and something in me that had been braced for weeks finally, quietly, let go.

The ceremony itself passed in a blur of white flowers and low murmured vows and John's hand steady around mine as we said the words a registrar had clearly recited hundreds of times before, his voice never once catching the way I half expected it to for a marriage built on paperwork rather than feeling. He looked at me properly only once, right as I said I do, something unguarded flickering across his face too fast for me to name before the practiced composure slid back into place. My mother cried, quietly at first and then not quietly at all.

My father, a man of very few words, shook John's hand afterward with a grip that suggested a private conversation had happened somewhere in the handshake itself, and John, to his credit, didn't flinch from it.

The reception was smaller and quieter than the wedding of a man worth what John was worth had any right to be, held in a private room with low light and too many white flowers, exactly as we'd agreed, exactly as impersonal as a contract required. I moved through it the way I imagined actors move through a set they don't fully believe in, smiling at the right moments, accepting congratulations from strangers who all seemed to know my new husband far better than they knew me.

It was near the start of the reception, scanning the room out of habit, that I realized who wasn't there.

"Where's your mum?" I asked, meaning it lightly, half expecting to be introduced to the woman I remembered liking so much, the one who used to ask after my work and remember the details when John himself forgot to. "I thought she'd want to see this. She always liked me, if I recall."

Something crossed his face, there and gone too fast to read. "We'll talk about her later. She's not here right now."

"John—"

"Later, Isabel. Please." He said it gently enough that I let it go, though something about the way he said it sat wrong in my chest for the rest of the evening, a small unanswered note underneath everything else. I remember asking him about his mom a couple of times while planning for this wedding, and he totally brushed it off that she wasn't around. I thought she might have traveled for a business trip like the wealthy always did. John adored his mother so much, and she did him. He is her only son, and it wouldn't make sense if she wasn't there.

Ever since we broke up, I lost touch with the family, so I had no idea what was happening in their lives. I liked his mom anyway. She was nice, better than the dad who didn't like me one bit. I wondered why I wasn't seeing his mother.

I found out why an hour later, standing near the bar, watching John across the room accept congratulations from someone I didn't recognize, when an older woman I'd never seen before appeared at my elbow, materializing so quietly I nearly started. She was perhaps seventy, elegantly dressed in dark green silk, watching John with an expression I couldn't immediately place, something between grief and calculation, the kind of look that suggested she'd been waiting a long time for an opportunity exactly like this one.

"He has his mother's eyes," she said, not looking at me, still watching him. "Everyone always says the Reed men have their father's ambition. Nobody ever mentions the mother anymore. Convenient, isn't it, how quickly people stop asking questions once enough money changes hands."

"I'm sorry," I said, "have we met—"

"Does he know you still don't know?" She turned to face me properly now, something urgent underneath the calm. "Three years, and no one's said her name once tonight. Strange, at her own son's wedding."

The words didn't land right away. My mind kept trying to fit them into a shape that made sense and failing.

"Know what?" I said carefully.

"Ask your husband," she said, "to tell you what actually happened to his mother. Ask him why the story's never once matched the timeline, and ask him why his own uncle can't quite meet your eye whenever her name almost comes up."

And then she was gone, moving into the crowd before I could get another word out, before I could even fully process what she'd said, leaving me standing there with a glass of champagne going warm in my hand and my new husband laughing at something across the room, entirely unaware that I had just learned, from a stranger at our own wedding, that the woman I'd been picturing walking through that door all evening might have been dead for years, and that whatever had actually happened to her, someone in this room still had reason to keep it buried.