The Understudy Bride

CHAPTERTHREE

The band packed up around eleven. The waiters began clearing centerpieces before half the guests had said their goodbyes. Her father hugged three different men that she didn't recognize, a woman in emerald green kissed her cheek and told her, again, how radiant she'd looked, and Mia thanked her.

By the time the car pulled up to the curb, her feet were numb , and she hadn't realized how cold it was until she was already inside the back seat.

Damian got in beside her without a word, loosening his tie with one hand and the top button on his collar with the other, and whatever version of him that had smiled for three hundred cameras all night simply wasn't in the car anymore. The driver pulled out into traffic. Neither of them spoke. Mia watched Manhattan blur past the window and pressed her thumbnail into the seam of the clutch on her lap, the way she always did when she was working up to saying something hard. She hadn't gotten there yet. Her phone buzzed before she could.

Jo. Are you alive? Call me the SECOND you can.

Mia reached to silence it before Damian noticed, and her hand, unsteady from champagne, from adrenaline, from six straight hours of performing a stranger's life, fumbled the clasp. The clutch tipped. A lipstick rolled onto the seat between them. A folded receipt slid to the floor. And her driver's license, small and plastic, caught the passing streetlight for just long enough before it landed an inch from Damian's knee.

Mia Alvarez.

Neither of them moved. Mia's whole body went cold, and had nothing to do with the air conditioning.

Damian picked it up, held it under the next streetlight and studied it — the photo, the name, the birthdate that made her two years older than the woman he'd met at every family dinner leading up to today.

"Damian-"

" Don't." His voice remained quiet, not raised. That was worse than shouting would have been. "Don't say anything yet."

He turned the card over once, checking the back, and then set it down on the seat between them and had nothing to do with it again.

"Your name is MIA."

"Yes."

" Not Bianca."

"No."

"You're Bianca's—"

" Sister. Half-sister. Older." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "She left this morning. A note, that's all we got. My father-"

"I'm not asking for the story." His tone hadn't shifted. The stillness of it frightened her more than anger would have. "I'm asking you to confirm the facts. I married a woman who isn't who I believed her to be, at a ceremony that took the state of New York about ninety seconds to make legally binding, in front of three hundred witnesses and a merger worth four hundred million dollars."

"I know how it sounds."

"I don't think you do. If you understood how this sounds, you'd have said something before the ceremony. In the car on the way there. At any point in the last six hours when you had the chance."

"There wasn't a chance—"

"There's always a chance to say no." His voice sharpened, still quiet, just edged now. "I've built a career on people telling me there wasn't a chance to do the right thing. There's always a chance. You made a choice tonight, Miss Alvarez, at every point, and the choice you kept making was silence."

Mia opened her mouth to argue, and found she didn't have anything to argue with. He wasn't wrong. She'd had a hundred small openings and let every one of them close.

"My father told me it required a legal marriage. He never told me a name would need to match. I found out the actual terms about four minutes before I walked down that aisle." Her voice cracked slightly, and she hated that it did. "I didn't plan this. Nobody asked me if I wanted this."

"And yet here you are. Married to me." He said flatly. "Wearing her dress. Answering to her guest list. I'd like to know which parts of tonight were you and which parts were hers, because from where I was standing, there was no difference at all."

That landed exactly the way he intended it to, and Mia's face went hot, and underneath the humiliation, something colder rose up, something that had been building for hours, under the smiling and the performing and the silence he was now furious about.

"You want to know the difference?" Her voice came out sharper than she usually let it. "Bianca would have told you before the ceremony. She's never once in her life sat quietly through something she didn't want. I sat through it because I've spent twenty-six years being told my job is to make things easier for everyone else in the room. That's the difference. You married the daughter who does what she's told instead of the one who runs from it."

Something shifted behind his eyes — not softening, more like recalculation, a man realizing the report in front of him didn't match the summary he'd been given. Then it closed again, fast.

"I'll have my lawyer draft the annulment paperwork tonight," he said, turning back to the window. "You'll be compensated for your participation. Discreetly."

"Compensated," MIA repeated, flat.

"It's the standard arrangement in situations like this."

"Standard arrangement." Mia repeated it back to him like the words tasted bad. "You think this is about money?"

She stood up. She hadn't planned to, but sitting there another second felt impossible.

"I spent my sister's wedding wearing her dress, answering her name, smiling for people who think I'm someone I'm not. And you want to hand me a check and call it compensation, like I just worked a shift I didn't sign up for." Her hands were shaking now, and she let them. "I don't want your money. I want to go home.

The car slowed. They'd reached the hotel her father had booked for her under an assumed name, for exactly this reason — a quiet exit before the annulment could be arranged. Damian didn't wait for her to finish. He reached past her and opened the door himself.

"We'll finish this through counsel," he said, already somewhere else in his head. "Goodnight, Miss Alvarez."

The car was already pulling away by the time Mia's feet hit the pavement. She stood there a second too long, watching it merge back into traffic, before she remembered to actually move.

Every step toward the hotel doors hurt. The borrowed heels had been rubbing her feet raw for hours, and she was only feeling it now, a sharp ache climbing up the back of her legs with each step. The dress still wasn't hers. And inside her clutch was the driver's license that had just undone everything, in less time than it took to say her own name out loud.

She stood on the sidewalk for a long moment, city noise rushing past in both directions, and let herself cry — alone for the first time all day, without an audience. It lasted about ninety seconds. Then she wiped her face, straightened her spine the way she'd taught herself a hundred times before, and went inside to call the one person who would actually pick up at midnight on a night like this.

Jo. Her roommate, for three years before the wedding planning, ate every spare hour they used to spend together. The only person who'd told her not to go through with tonight.

"Jo," she said, when the line connected, her voice was raw. "I need you to not ask questions for about thirty seconds, and then help me figure out what I do next."

A pause. Then Jo's voice, sharp with worry, keys already jingling in the background. "Mia. Where are you? What happened? And don't you dare tell me not to ask questions, I've been sitting by this phone since the ceremony ended."

Mia sank onto the edge of the hotel bed, the phone pressed hard against her ear, and looked at her own left hand as if it belonged to someone else. The ring caught the light from the window — heavier than anything she'd ever worn, unfamiliar against her skin. She hadn't picked it. She hadn't picked any part of tonight.

"I got married," she said.

There was a long silence on the other end.

"I'm coming over," Jo said. "Don't move."

Mia was still wrong about how it would end. It would be three more days before she found out exactly how wrong — and by then, the annulment paperwork sitting on Damian Cole's desk would be the smallest problem either of them had.