Married To My Ex's Brother

Chapter 4: What I Should Not Have Done

Emily.

I finished my shift with Julian's threat still sitting in my chest like a stone, and Rhys's offer sitting right beside it, and I could not have said which one kept my hands moving faster through the last hour of service. I said nothing to Denise.

By the time I clocked out, the shaking in my hands had settled into something steadier, the kind of calm that comes after a decision has already been made and there is nothing left to do but follow it through.

I drove downtown with the windows cracked, cold air pulling at my hair, telling myself this was only information.

Rhys knew something about the marriage that I did not, something that would tell me exactly when and how to say what I intended to say, and one drink was a small price for that. I did not let myself think past the drink.

The bar he named was quiet, with dim lighting, candles burning low on every table, and no music loud enough to force anyone to raise their voice.

He was already seated at a corner table when I walked in, jacket off now, tie loosened, looking less like a man performing for a room and more like someone finally allowed to sit still.

"I did not think you would actually come," he said, standing halfway before I waved him back down.

"You said you knew why tonight was never about love," I said, sliding into the seat across from him. "I want to hear it before I decide anything else."

He studied me a moment, like he was deciding how much of it to give me all at once. "Eighteen months ago, your fiancé's father was days from restructuring his company," he said finally.

"Norwood moved money in that saved it, dressed up as a joint venture, so nobody outside a small circle would know how close it came to collapsing.

The wedding was the terms of that rescue, agreed on before Julian proposed to you. You were never a complication in that plan. You were just something that had not been dealt with yet."

I sat with that a moment, feeling it settle somewhere lower than the anger had reached before. "So he knew. This whole time, planning our wedding with me, he knew there was already a different one waiting to replace it."

"I would guess longer than you want to know," Rhys said. "I only found the paper trail two years ago, and I still do not know exactly when he was told to end things with you instead of you finding out the way you did tonight."

"That is almost worse," I said. "He had a version where I never had to see that sign."

"He chose not to take it."

I studied him through the candlelight, the stillness in him I had noticed from across the ballroom, and asked I had been circling in the hallway. "Why does this matter to you? You could have watched tonight happen and said nothing, the way you clearly know how to do."

Something crossed his face, quick and unguarded, before he caught it.

"Because I have spent thirty-two years watching this family decide who matters and who gets erased, and tonight I watched them do it to you in about four hours instead of a lifetime. I know exactly what that erasure looks like from the inside."

He turned his glass once on the table, not drinking from it.

"My mother raised me in two countries, worked doubles at a diner so I could go to a decent school, and never once let me believe Desmond owed us anything, even though he was my father. I have never been invited to a single holiday. Not one, in thirty-two years. I built a firm with my own name on the door because it was the only way I knew how to matter to anyone in that family without asking permission first."

"And now you want to matter by helping me blow up Julian's wedding after the fact."

"I want the truth told," he said, and there was nothing done in it. "I have wanted that for longer than tonight. You are just the first person who walked into that ballroom already deciding to want the same thing."

I turned my glass in slow circles, weighing that against everything Julian had said to me in the hallway, every warning about what a scene would cost me.

"If I do this," I said, "if I say something publicly, it does not stay contained to Julian. You understand that. It touches Desmond. It touches Norwood. It might touch you."

"I know exactly what it touches," he said. "I have known longer than you have."

"Then why help me instead of using it yourself, quietly, the way people like you usually do?"

Something flickered behind his eyes, and for a moment I thought he might not answer honestly. "Because quietly has never once worked out for me," he said.

"And because watching you decide not to disappear tonight was the first honest thing I have seen from anyone in that family in longer than I can remember. I did not want to be the reason you changed your mind about that."

I studied him a long moment, the candlelight low between us, and felt the anger from the ballroom shift into something else, something that had less to do with Julian and more to do with the man across from me who had spent an entire evening being erased and had still noticed her being erased too.

"Walk me to my car," I said, standing before either of us could talk ourselves out of whatever this was becoming.

He did not walk me to my car. "Or," he said, standing slower than I had, "You could come see the river from my apartment instead. No charm laid on thick. No pressure behind it. Just somewhere quieter than this to finish the conversation, if you want to."

Some reckless part of me that wanted to decide something for myself for once, after a night of everyone else deciding things around me, said yes before I let myself think better of it.

His building sat on a quiet street a few blocks from the water, and neither of us said much on the way up, the silence between us thick with everything neither of us wanted to name yet. At his door, key already in his hand, he paused before he unlocked it.

"You do not have to come in," he said. "I mean that."

"I know," I said.

"This was supposed to be about Julian and Desmond, and a truth neither of us has said out loud yet."

"I know that too."

He looked at me for a long moment, close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him in the cold night air, and he still did not reach for me.

"Say the word, and I will drive you back to your car right now," he said. "No hard feelings, and I will still tell you everything you need to know tomorrow."

I did not say a word.

"Emily," he said, quieter now.

"Rhys," I said, and that was an answer.

He leaned down slowly, giving me every second in the world to step back, and I did not take it.

His mouth found mine, and the door had not even finished closing behind us when I understood there was no version of tomorrow where I walked away from this untouched.