Forced To Marry My Dead Fiance's Brother

010 The Box I Wasn't Ready To Open

Christabel

Sebastian called back within another hour which I noted down in my brain because ninety seconds felt like something after a morning of him running from every hard conversation I tried to have with him.

"Where are you," he said, no hello, just the question which annoyed me

"Pharmacy on Rue Saint-Honoré. Jane's with me, she's fine, she's just confused why two men keep taking her picture through the window."

"Don't move. I'm sending a car and security, five minutes, I will be there before you know it."

He hung up before I could answer, and I stood there at the counter with Jane's small hand in mine, watching two men with cameras loiter outside the glass like vultures who'd found something worth circling, and I thought, absurdly, about how three weeks ago my biggest problem had been whether the caterer could do a gluten free option for my cousin.

The car arrived in four minutes. A driver I didn't recognize hustled us into the back seat, and security I definitely didn't recognize formed some kind of wall between us and the cameras, and within ten minutes we were back in the penthouse, safe, and Jane had fallen asleep against my lap somewhere around the second traffic light already exhausted from an outing that should have taken fifteen minutes and instead had turned into a small problem thank God it was resolved.

I carried her to her room, tucked her in, and stood in the doorway for a long moment just watching her breathe, small and steady and something in my chest ached in a way I didn't have a name for yet, something that felt dangerously close to love for a child who wasn't mine and never would be.

Odette found me afterward in the hallway, holding a box.

"This came for you this morning," she said. "I forgot, with everything happening. It was addressed to you, because of this address."

I took it without really looking at it, distracted, exhausted, and it wasn't until I was alone in my room, door shut, sitting on the edge of that too-soft bed, that I actually read the return label.

Gabriel's apartment. His name on it, crossed out, mine written above it in handwriting I didn't recognize.

My hands went cold before I even opened it.

Inside, wrapped in tissue paper someone had clearly taken care with, were pieces of a life I never got to finish building. A sweater of mine he'd kept at his place because I was always cold and he was always warm. A photograph of the two of us at the beach the summer before, both of us sunburned and laughing at something I could no longer remember the joke of. A small velvet box that I opened with fingers that had gone numb, and inside it, a second ring, not the engagement ring I already had, something smaller, simpler, with a note tucked beneath it in his handwriting.

For our first anniversary. Early, I know. But I wanted you to have something that was just about us, not about the wedding, not about the party, just you and me. I love you more than I know how to say out loud without sounding like a greeting card, so I'm writing it down instead. Happy almost-forever, to you the love of my life Christabel.

I don't know how long I sat there long enough that my knees went stiff from staying folded the same way that when I finally looked up, Sebastian was standing in my doorway, and I had no idea how long he'd been there.

"I knocked," he said quietly. "You didn't answer."

I didn't trust my voice, so I didn't try to use it. I just held up the note, the ring still sitting in its box beside me, and watched something shift across his face when he understood what he was looking at.

"That's his handwriting," he said, more to himself than to me, and crossed the room before I could stop him, sitting down on the edge of the bed at a careful distance, close enough to see but not close enough to touch.

"He wanted to give it to me early," I said, and my voice finally broke on the last word, eleven days of holding myself together coming apart all at once in a room that still smelled like nothing like Gabriel, in a house that still didn't feel like mine. "He wanted me to have something that was just ours. And now I'm sitting here wearing his brother's ring instead, in his brother's house, and I don't know how to hold both of those things at the same time, I don't know how anyone is supposed to."

Sebastian didn't say anything for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost all of its usual edge, stripped down to something plain and tired and, for the first time since I'd met him, completely without armor.

"I don't know either," he said. "I've been trying to figure that out for three years, about someone else. I still haven't managed it."

I looked up at him then, really looked, past the cold exterior and the tailored suits and the careful distance he kept from everyone, and for just a moment, sitting on the edge of that bed with a dead man's handwriting between us, I saw something in his face that looked almost exactly like my own grief looking back at me.

"Tell me about her," I said. "Elena."

Something crossed his face, quick, guarded, and for a second I thought he'd retreat the way he always did, get up, find a meeting, disappear behind the wall he kept so carefully maintained. But he didn't. He sat there, hands loose in his lap, and after a long moment, he started to talk.