Chapter 3: The Beginning of the End (Flashback)
786 Words
Chapter 3: The Beginning of the End (Flashback)
Six months before the wedding.
The café was quiet, tucked between luxury boutiques and banks on a street Bruce knew well. It was the kind of place where politicians whispered over cappuccinos and old money sipped Earl Grey with calculated silence.
Bruce glanced at his Rolex—gifted by his father the day he got accepted into Harvard’s pre-law program. It gleamed, just like the path laid out for him since birth.
“Still early,” he muttered, adjusting the collar of his cashmere coat.
Then the door opened, and a gust of cool air rushed in before she did.
Amanda.
All silk hair and red lips, like something out of a memory that refused to fade.
“Brucey,” she cooed, sliding into the seat across from him without waiting for an invitation.
He stiffened. “Amanda. You said you were in Paris.”
She smirked, sipping from his untouched tea like it was hers. “Finished early. Daddy wanted me back for the season. You know how it is.”
He did. Amanda’s world was cut from a different cloth—old money, private jets, scandals hidden behind designer smiles. Their fathers were golf club friends, their mothers used to compare prep school resumes. Amanda and Bruce had grown up in the same elite circles, kissed behind curtains at charity galas, played house in pool cabanas while their parents toasted futures.
Amanda had been his first everything—kiss, heartbreak, obsession.
And she knew it.
“I heard you’re engaged,” she said lightly, eyes flicking to his hand. “To that girl. What’s her name? The scholarship student?”
“Rachel,” Bruce said quietly. “Her name is Rachel.”
Amanda tilted her head, smile feline. “Right. The one with the shy smile and the bleeding heart.”
Bruce tensed. “She’s not like you.”
“No,” Amanda said, licking sugar from her spoon. “She’s not.”
A beat passed.
Then she leaned forward, voice lower. “Why are you really marrying her, Bruce? Because you love her? Or because it’s the first time someone looked at you like you weren’t your father’s shadow?”
He flinched.
Amanda’s gaze softened. “I know you. You think love will save you from who you’re expected to be. But you and I… we were made for the same world. The same games.”
“You left,” Bruce said bitterly. “You didn’t want me.”
“I wanted you to fight,” she said, suddenly fierce. “But you gave up. You settled.”
Bruce looked away.
Then she said the words that cracked him open.
“My father’s willing to support you to Harvard Law. Internships, connections—the works. But there’s one condition.”
He already knew.
“Leave her,” Amanda said, her voice a knife in silk. “Do it in a way that ends the illusion. Show me you’re not soft. Show me the Bruce I remember.”
He swallowed hard. “You’re asking me to ruin her.”
Amanda’s smile didn’t waver. “I’m asking you to come home.”
Over the months, Amanda slithered back into his life—first as a friend, then a shadow, then a storm.
When Rachel wasn't there, she would invite him to lunches and sow seeds.
“You sure she likes red roses? I mean, you always hated them.”
She’d text him late at night: Remember the lakehouse? The snowstorm? You said you'd love me forever.
And Bruce—caught between obligation and obsession—began to falter.
Rachel noticed, of course.
“Are you distracted lately?” she had asked one night while folding her school notes.
Bruce had kissed her forehead, whispered, “Just tired.”
But guilt festered like rot.
Amanda's grip tightened, though. She was able to play on his fears of being mediocre, his need to win his father's approval, his guilt about her brother, and his longing for the girl who used to be the object of his affection.
And when she suggested the prank—the “wedding twist”—Bruce balked.
“This is cruel,” he had snapped. “Rachel doesn’t deserve this.”
Amanda had only smiled. “She deserves the truth. That you were never really hers.”
Back in the present, Rachel stood at the chapel doors, unaware that the storm had been planned long before she walked down the aisle.
What she heard behind that door wasn't just betrayal.
It was the final act of a play she was never meant to star in.
Only the fool at the center of the punchline.
- Writer
