Forced To Marry My Dead Fiance's Brother

011 The Man I Almost Fell For

Sebastian

"She hated the color blue," I said.

It was not where I had intended to start. It wasn't even on the map of the conversation I had spent the last twenty minutes mentally drafting, but it was the first entirely true thing that came to mind. Once it slipped past my mouth, I found I couldn't stop the rest from following. The dam had cracked, and the water was going to find its way out whether I gave it permission or not.

"Everyone assumed she loved it, because her eyes were blue, because people build these little stories about you based on five seconds of observation and then expect you to live inside them forever. She actually hated it. Said it made her feel like furniture. Like a painted chair in the corner of someone else’s room."

Christabel didn't say anything. She didn't offer a polite, empty nod or try to steer me toward a safer topic. She just watched me, sitting back against the headboard, still holding that piece of paper in her lap with both hands. She held it delicately, carefully, like it might dissolve into ash if her grip shifted too quickly. Something about her silence—the absolute, patient weight of it—didn't make the air feel heavy; it made it easier to keep talking instead of harder. It created a strange sort of vacuum that pulled the words right out of my throat.

"She used to leave notes for me too," I said, my gaze dropping down to the vintage floorboards between us, then look down on floors just not to look her. "Not romantic ones, mostly just the grocery lists with little insults written in the margins if I forgot to buy something the week before. Reminders that I was, and I quote, an emotionally constipated workaholic who needed to eat a vegetable that wasn't ketchup."

A sound came out of me then—a low, rough noise that might have been a laugh. It was the first genuine, unprompted one to escape me longer than I wanted to admit to myself, let alone out loud.

"I kept every single one," I admitted, the realization landing with a fresh, sharp sting. "I don't know why. I have a drawer full of scrap paper and torn envelopes in my office—grocery lists from a woman who's been gone three years."

"That's not strange," Christabel said. Her voice was barely louder than a breath, carrying a quiet certainty that cut straight through the noise in my head. "That's just love with nowhere left to go."

I looked up and caught her eye. Really looked at her.

In that fraction of a second, something deep in my chest shifted—a sudden, terrifying movement, like a heavy bolt sliding back inside a locked door. It was a slow uncoiling of a thing I had kept bound, gagged, and wound tight for three straight years. For one dangerous, reckless second, I thought about reaching across the small distance between us. I thought about taking her hand the way Jane used to take mine—without asking, without overthinking it, without calculating the collateral damage first.

I didn't do it.

I caught myself right at the very edge of the precipice, the way you catch your weight at the top of a darkened staircase after your foot misses a step—that sharp, violent lurch of your whole body remembering, in a panic, that it isn't supposed to fall.

"I should let you rest," I said. The words came out too clipped, too loud. I stood up fast, pulling my frame up and out of the chair, putting physical distance between us as if distance had ever been a real solution to an internal problem. "It's been a long day. You need sleep."

Christabel blinked, visibly startled by the sudden shift in velocity. Something flickered across her features—a raw, vulnerable shadow that looked painfully close to hurt—before she caught herself and smoothed it over with a practiced, quiet composure.

"Right," she said, her voice flattening out. "Of course."

"Christabel—"

"You should go, Sebastian. It's fine."

It wasn't fine. The air in the room was thick with everything we weren't saying, vibrating with it, and we both knew it wasn't fine. But I turned and left anyway, because running, stepping back, and building walls were the only skills I actually trusted myself to execute without failing.

I walked the length of that dim, quiet hallway back to my own room with my pulse hammering in my throat, my heart going harder and faster than it had any right to over a trivial conversation about old grocery lists.

I sat on the edge of my own bed for a long time afterward, staring into the dark. I replayed every single second of the interaction, dissecting it with an obsessive precision: the exact way her voice had softened when she offered me that unexpected mercy; the way I had almost, reached for her hand like it was the most natural thing in the world; like three years of careful, deliberate solitude hadn't been built to protect me from this exact kind of exposure.

This was not the plan.

The plan had been straightforward. It was supposed to be a transactional arrangement, a cold business decision dressed up in the neat, acceptable fabric of a marriage for the sake of the company's reputation and the stability of a motherless little girl. The plan had never once included the possibility that I might start to feel something real for the woman my brother was supposed to marry—something warm and persistent that had no business existing this fast, this easily, over an old memory and a scrap of paper.

I tried to rationalize it. I told myself it was just grief playing tricks on a tired mind. Two people drowning in the exact same stretch of deep water will always reach out and grab onto each other; that isn't romance, that's just survival instinct. It's basic human biology, nothing more complicated than a reflex.

I told myself this several times, lying back against the pillows and staring up at the shadows on the ceiling, and I almost managed to believe it by the time pure exhaustion finally pulled me under.

My phone woke me at the late hour of the night. The screen flared to life, bright and harsh against the dark room, signaling a text from a number I didn't recognize. No name, no signature, no greeting. Just two stark lines text:

"You should ask her what else Gabriel sent before he died. Not everything in that box was innocent."