Forced To Marry My Dead Fiance's Brother

002 The Woman In Black Who Wasn't There To Grieve

Christabel

The confirmation came four hours later, while I was still in my dress because nobody had the heart to tell me to change and I didn't have the heart to ask why they wanted me to.

Dental records. That was the word they used. Dental records, like Gabriel was a filing cabinet and not a person who used to steal fries off my plate and call it a tax for being in a relationship with him. My father took the second call in the hallway so I wouldn't have to hear the details, but the walls in that hotel were thin, and I heard enough. I heard the word confirmed. I heard him say thank you in a voice that didn't sound like his.

I didn't scream. I didn't cry, not really, not the kind you see in movies. I just sat down on the floor of that bridal suite in my mermaid dress with gold thread still catching the light and I stayed there until Marie physically picked me up under the arms like I was a child who'd fallen asleep on the couch.

That was eleven days ago.

The funeral was held at the same cathedral where the wedding was supposed to happen, which I still think somebody should have vetoed, but nobody asked me, and by then I had stopped having opinions about anything. I wore black instead of white. Same florist. Different flowers. Lilies instead of peonies, because apparently grief has a dress code and nobody warns you about it in advance.

I stood at the front with my father's hand on my shoulder, and I watched two hundred people file past a closed casket, and I thought about how strange it was that a room could be that full and I could still feel like the only person in it.

"He would have hated this," Marie whispered next to me. "Too many white lilies. He always said they smelled like a dentist's office."

I laughed. Actually laughed, out loud, in the front row of a funeral, and half the room turned to look at me like I'd lost my mind, and maybe I had, a little, because grief does strange things to a person's sense of humor. It doesn't turn it off. It just points it somewhere sideways.

That was when I first noticed her.

Beatrix Vettel didn't cry either, but her not crying looked nothing like mine. Mine looked like shock. Hers looked like control, the kind you practice in a mirror. She sat in the front pew across the aisle in a black dress that probably cost more than my father's shop made in a month, silver blonde hair pulled back so tight it looked like it hurt, and she watched the casket the entire service without blinking once. Not once. I know because I kept looking at her instead of at the flowers, because it was easier than looking at the flowers.

Sebastian sat beside her, jaw locked, eyes forward, a little girl with dark curls tucked into the seat beside him who I would later learn was Jane, though at the time I only knew her as a small shape in a black dress too big for her, swinging her feet because her legs didn't reach the floor.

Nobody introduced us that day. Sebastian didn't look at me once, not during the service, not during the burial, not during the horrible stretch afterward where everyone stood around drinking champagne they didn't want because somebody decided that's what you do at a Vettel funeral, even for the son nobody talked about enough while he was alive.

I was refilling my water glass at the edge of the reception, mostly to have somewhere to put my hands, when Beatrix found me.

"Christabel." She said my name like she was trying it on. "May I speak with you."

It wasn't really a question. I nodded anyway, because what else do you do.

"I'm so sorry for your loss," she said, and it came out smooth, rehearsed, the kind of sorry people say at the register of a*****e. "Gabriel spoke of you often."

"He did?"

"Constantly." A pause, just long enough to feel deliberate. "He would have wanted you taken care of."

"I don't need to be taken care of." The words came out sharper than I meant them, grief making my manners unreliable. "I'm fine. I have my father."

"Of course." Her eyes moved past me, to where my father stood near the door, looking small and gray in his one good suit, the shop's bank statements probably sitting in his coat pocket the way they always did lately, folded up like a wound he kept touching to see if it still hurt. Beatrix's mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Your father has had a difficult year, hasn't he. The shop."

My stomach dropped. "How do you know about the shop."

"I make it my business to know things, dear. It's how I've survived this family for thirty years." She set her champagne glass down on the table between us, untouched, and looked at me the way you look at something you're deciding whether to buy. "I'd like to speak with him. Would you mind terribly."

"About what."

"About family," she said. "About what it means to take care of the people we have left."

She didn't wait for me to answer. She crossed the room in unhurried steps, and I watched her lean down and say something low into my father's ear, and I watched the color drain out of his already gray face, and I watched him nod, once, slow, like a man agreeing to something he didn't fully understand yet.

He found me twenty minutes later by the coat check, and he had the look he used to get right before telling me the shop might close, the look that meant something was about to change whether I wanted it to or not.

"Christabel," he said. "Beatrix wants to talk to us. Both of us. Tomorrow."

"About what, Dad."

He couldn't meet my eyes.

"She says she has a way to save the shop," he said. "But there's a condition."