Rival Hearts

Chapter Eleven: Separate Beds

Three days into my marriage, I woke up in the same bed I had slept in since I was twelve, sunlight cutting thin lines across the same faded quilt, and for one disoriented moment before memory caught up with me, I forgot I had a husband at all.

The ring on my finger reminded me quickly enough. I lay there turning it in the morning light, the weight of it still unfamiliar, still foreign in a way I doubted would ever fully settle. Somewhere across the city, in a house I had visited exactly twice, Kael was presumably waking up in his own childhood bed, in his own untouched room, neither of us having so much as discussed the estate clause since my father's warning in the hallway three nights ago.

I hadn't gone to the Voss estate. Neither, as far as I knew, had Kael come looking for me. We existed, apparently, in a strange legal limbo — married on paper, strangers in practice, both of us quietly testing how long we could avoid the reality my father insisted mattered more than either of us understood.

My mother found me at breakfast, her expression carrying the particular tightness of a woman rehearsing a conversation she didn't want to have.

"Your father wants to know when you're moving your things to the estate," she said, sliding into the seat across from me, her coffee untouched.

"I haven't decided."

"Wren." She said my name the way she always did when patience was running thin. "This isn't a decision. It's an obligation. You know what's riding on it."

"I know what he told me is riding on it." I pushed my toast around my plate, appetite gone entirely. "Which, notably, was nothing specific. Just vague warnings about consequences he refuses to explain."

"Your father doesn't do anything without reason."

"That's not the same as him doing things I understand." I set my fork down harder than I meant to. "I got married three days ago to a man I've known for two weeks, Mom. I think I'm allowed a little time before I pack up my entire life and move into a house full of strangers."

My mother studied me for a long moment, something softening in her expression despite the tension still sitting in her shoulders. "I know this hasn't been fair to you," she said quietly. "I've told your father as much, more than once. But the two of you not living together — it's starting to draw attention we can't afford right now."

"What kind of attention?"

She hesitated, and the pause itself made my stomach drop before she even answered.

"There's been some talk," she said carefully. "Society pages. A few people noticed you weren't at the Voss estate the morning after the wedding, and word travels fast in circles like ours. Nothing's been printed yet, as far as I know. But it will be, if this continues much longer."

I sat with that for a moment, the toast forgotten entirely now, my appetite replaced by a slow, creeping dread. A cold, distant marriage was one thing when it stayed private, an arrangement only the two families and their lawyers needed to understand. A public one was something else entirely — a story, a headline, a piece of gossip that would follow both families around for months if it landed the wrong way.

"I'll think about it," I said, giving her nothing close to an actual answer, and my mother, wisely, didn't push further.

---

I spent the rest of the morning at the office, trying to lose myself in old client files rather than think about beds, estates, or headlines I hadn't seen yet. It worked, mostly, until Ivy called just past noon, her voice pitched somewhere between concern and barely-contained curiosity.

"Have you seen the Aldermere Ledger's society column today?"

My stomach dropped a second time. "No. Why?"

"You should probably sit down."

I was already sitting, but I gripped the edge of my desk anyway, some instinct bracing for impact before she even continued.

"There's a piece about the wedding," Ivy said, careful in a way that told me she'd already read the whole thing before calling. "It's not terrible, exactly. But it mentions that neither you nor Kael have been seen at the same address since the ceremony. Someone's calling it 'the coldest wedding Aldermere's seen in a decade.'"

I closed my eyes, the words landing with a weight I hadn't braced properly for.

"Word for word?" I asked.

"Close enough. There's a photo too. From the reception. You're both smiling in it, but—" She hesitated. "You can tell, if you're looking for it. It doesn't look real."

Of course it didn't look real. None of it had been real, not the smile, not the vows, not the kiss three hundred people had applauded for. But knowing that privately and having a stranger print it publicly, dressed up as clever commentary for anyone in Aldermere with a subscription and an appetite for gossip, were two very different kinds of humiliation.

"I have to go," I said, already reaching for my coat, my mind racing ahead to phone calls I didn't want to make and a conversation with my father I had been avoiding for three days.

"Wren—"

"I'll call you later." I hung up before she could say anything else, staring at my phone for a long moment before I finally opened the article myself, unable to stop myself from reading exactly the humiliation Ivy had tried to soften for me.

The photo was worse in person than she'd described. Kael and I, caught mid-smile at the reception, close enough to look convincing at a glance and clearly, painfully hollow if you knew what you were looking for. The caption beneath it read exactly the phrase Ivy had quoted, printed in bold, impossible to unsee once I had.

*The coldest wedding Aldermere's seen in a decade.*

I sat there staring at my own frozen smile for a long time, and somewhere underneath the humiliation, a colder, more practical thought started forming — one I suspected Kael, wherever he was right now, was probably having at the exact same moment.

Whatever this marriage actually was, however little either of us wanted it, we could no longer afford to let it look the way it actually felt.

I called him before I had even fully decided to. He picked up on the second ring, and I could tell from the flat, clipped edge in his voice that he had already seen the same article, already sat with the same sinking realization I had.

"You saw it," he said, not a question.

"I saw it."

"My father's already called twice." He exhaled, and for once the frustration in his voice sounded like it was aimed at the situation rather than at me. "He wants us photographed together somewhere public before the end of the week. Something that reads as normal."

"Normal." I let out a short, humorless laugh, dropping onto the edge of my bed. "We haven't managed one normal conversation since we met."

"No," he agreed. "But apparently we're going to have to fake it publicly whether we've earned it privately or not."

Neither of us spoke for a moment, the silence stretching long enough that I could hear him breathing on the other end, some quiet, mutual acknowledgment passing between us that neither of us was fully ready to voice out loud — that whatever came next, we were in it together now, for better or worse, whether either of us had chosen it or not.

"Fine," I said finally. "Tell me when and where."