Married To My Ex's Brother

Chapter 1: The Assignment

Emily.

The service entrance at the Norwood estate smelled like gardenia and hot wax, and I balanced a tray of empty champagne flutes against my hip while I waited for someone to tell me where to go.

Denise had called this the biggest booking Gilded Oak had landed all year, and she was not wrong. Even the hallway leading to the kitchen had chandeliers.

"Marsh, you are on the west terrace for cocktail hour," a coordinator said, clipboard pressed to her chest, already moving past me. "Then family table service once they are seated."

I nodded and kept walking. My rent was due in six days, and Julian and I still owed the venue deposit for our own wedding, the one we had pushed back twice in the two years we had been engaged, because neither of us could get ahead. A night like this would help.

Julian had been strange for two weeks. Short texts. Calls that went to voicemail with an apology stapled on after, always something about a client dinner or a late meeting.

The night before, his last text said he would be traveling for work and would call when he could. I had waited up longer than I wanted to admit, and eventually told myself the flight had probably run late.

The hallway opened into the foyer, and that was where I saw the sign.

It stood on a gold easel just inside the doors, its calligraphy so careful it looked printed rather than handwritten. I slowed down without meaning to. My eyes caught the names before my brain had a chance to stop them.

Presley Norwood & Julian Kessler

I stood there long enough that another server had to step around me with a tray of oysters. My mouth had gone dry. It was a common enough name, I told myself. There had to be a dozen Julian Kesslers between here and Charleston.

I made myself walk into the ballroom to prove it to myself.

The room was already half full, a string quartet playing near the far wall, waiters weaving through clusters of guests in tuxedos and gowns.

I scanned the crowd without letting myself look like I was scanning it, tray steady, feet moving toward the terrace doors like I had somewhere to be.

Then I saw him.

He stood near the champagne fountain, adjusting a cufflink, laughing at something a woman beside him said.

His mother, I realized, because I recognized her from a photo on his phone he had never once suggested I meet. Same jaw. Same laugh that tipped his head back too far.

Same watch I had helped him pick out on Broughton Street because he could not decide between two he liked.

There was no other Julian Kessler.

I do not remember setting the tray down on the nearest table, only that my hands were suddenly empty and shaking.

I turned to go back toward the kitchen, toward the door, toward anywhere that was not this room, and Denise caught my arm before I made it three steps.

"I need you," she said, low and fast. "Gia called in sick, and we are down a server for the family table. I know this is a big room, but I need you steady tonight, Marsh, please."

I opened my mouth to tell her I could not do it, and the words did not come. If I walked out now, Denise would have to explain it to a client who had paid a fortune for tonight to go perfectly, and I would be the reason it did not. I swallowed everything rising in my throat and nodded once.

"Family table," I said. "Got it."

She squeezed my arm and was gone. I picked the tray back up because my hands needed something to hold, and I walked toward the terrace to start pouring champagne for people who had no idea their groom was about to marry two women in one lifetime, just not both on purpose.

Cocktail hour blurred. I do not remember most of the conversations that happened around me, only the sound of ice against crystal and laughter that did not belong to me.

By the time the guests moved inside for dinner, I had convinced myself I could get through the night without him seeing me.

The head table was long, a dozen people wide, and I was assigned to the far end near the bridesmaids. If I kept my head down and my hands busy, there was a chance.

There was not.

I was three seats from the center, refilling a flute for an older woman in emerald silk, when I felt it. That stillness a person gets when someone across a room has locked onto them.

I looked up, and there he was, seated between his mother and his bride, mid-laughing at something Presley had said, and the laugh died on his face the second our eyes met.

His skin went the color of the tablecloth.

I kept pouring. My hand did not shake, which surprised me more than anything else that night, because inside my chest felt like it had been scraped open with a spoon.

He did not stand up. He did not say my name. He glanced sideways at his mother first, quick and nervous, like he was checking whether she had noticed anything, and that told me more than his face ever could.

He was not afraid of losing me. He was afraid of being caught.

Somewhere down the table, I caught a fragment of his mother's voice, pitched low to the woman beside her, something about an arrangement she and Desmond had agreed to keep quiet a little longer.

I did not know what it meant, and I filed it away without deciding to, the way you remember a stray word from a language you do not speak yet.

I moved to the next glass, then the next, working my way down the table like nothing had happened, because nothing was allowed to happen, not here, not in front of two hundred people who had paid a caterer to make their night perfect.

Somewhere between the third glass and the fourth, something in me stopped asking what I should do and started deciding.

I was not going to disappear into the kitchen and let this happen without a word.

I did not yet know what I would say or when, but I knew I was not walking out of this house and letting Julian marry Presley Norwood while I stood silently on the other side of a serving tray. He owed me that much. He owed me the truth, said out loud, in front of someone besides me.

I almost made it past him.

His hand closed around my wrist before I cleared the end of the table, fingers tight enough to stop me mid-step, and he pulled me half behind the heavy drape separating the head table from the service hallway before I could pull free. His face was close to mine, pale and furious in a way that had nothing to do with guilt.

"Keep your voice down," he said.

I looked at his hand until he let go of me, and something steadied inside my chest.

"No," I said.