Never Mine

Part 2: The Ceremony

The reception dragged on like some kind of beautifully dressed hostage situation, every smile rehearsed, every toast a performance nobody had asked to sit through.

They were dancing now — my mother, Amanda West, and his father, James Carter, gliding across the center of the ballroom like they'd been rehearsing this exact moment for years, maybe longer than either of them would ever admit. Everyone clapped. Someone near me dabbed at a tear that hadn't done a single thing to earn itself.

I glanced at Finn.

He didn't clap.

"I don't know what you're thinking," I said softly, not looking at him, watching the dance floor instead like it might tell me something useful. "But I don't approve of this either. I don't want you to think I support it."

He turned his head toward me slowly, unhurried, like even that small motion cost him something he didn't want to spend. His eyes didn't narrow. They sharpened instead, the way a lens does when it finds its focus.

"I don't care what you think," he said.

The words dropped into me like ice cubes into a glass, sharp and sudden and cold all the way down. I opened my mouth to respond and found nothing there — the words had simply vanished, evaporated somewhere between my chest and my throat.

He didn't speak. Didn't look at me. His eyes stayed fixed on the dance floor, on the parents neither of us had chosen, watching them twirl through a lie they'd dressed up in white lace and called love.

I stayed quiet too. My fingers traced slow circles around the rim of my glass, over and over, a small useless ritual to keep my hands from doing something worse.

"I guess nothing I say would change your mind," I said eventually, more to the silence than to him.

Finn didn't answer. He pushed back from the table and left without a word, without the smallest pretense of manners, like simply being near me made his skin itch beneath his collar.

For hours — actual hours — I sat alone at that ridiculous table, caught between the urge to grab my purse and disappear into the night and the stubborn, exhausted decision to sit through every manufactured minute of it rather than give anyone the satisfaction of watching me run.

Eventually, I made up my mind.

I was going to call my father. Tell him I wanted to come live with him. Tomorrow, if he'd have me — and I knew he would.

Whatever scene my mother made didn't matter anymore. I was done being polite for an audience that had never once been polite to me in return.

Just as I thought I'd finally been left alone, Finn reappeared, no warning, no preamble. He pulled the chair back and sat directly across from me again, orange juice in hand that I would have bet wasn't only juice.

His back was angled toward the dance floor, his face pointed somewhere in my direction without quite landing on me — bored, vaguely furious, like the whole evening had personally wronged him.

Finally, the guests began to thin. Glitter heels vanished into waiting cars. Laughter faded into the kind of silence only a very expensive party can afford.

I reached for my clutch, hoping to slip out unnoticed, into the dark, into anywhere else.

No such luck.

"Valerie!" My mother's voice, pitched too bright, cutting through the last of the noise. She was already moving toward us, James at her side, both of them arriving at our table like it was a photo opportunity they'd been saving.

"James has been so busy lately, we never got the chance to introduce you two properly," my mother said, her smile stretched a size too wide. "But it looks like you're already getting along!"

I raised one eyebrow and barely managed to keep the rest of my face still.

Finn didn't bother. He smiled — sharp, not sweet, a blade dressed up as a courtesy. "Maybe it's because you two got married like it was a fire sale."

James's smile didn't move, but something behind his eyes went very, very still, like stone right before it cracked.

"Yes, it was fast," my mother said, still smiling, as though the smile itself could hold the whole night together by sheer force of will.

"That's why we've postponed the honeymoon. We'll head home tonight — settle in as a family."

She looked at James like she needed him to confirm the illusion was still standing.

"Finn," James said, cool and even, "take Valerie to the car. We'll be right behind you."

Finn didn't protest. He gave a small nod and stood.

So did I.

He didn't say a word, didn't glance back to check whether I was following. I followed anyway, watching the stiff line of his shoulders under the soft light, the way he seemed to stand apart from the glow of the party behind us — a shadow refusing to blur into the rest of the evening.

Outside, the Carter family car waited, sleek and black and running in perfect silence, like even the engine had been trained not to disturb anyone.

I hesitated. Finn turned then, looking at me for the first time since we'd left the hall, and for a second the air itself seemed to change — cooler, sharper, like I'd stepped without warning into an entirely different season.

"Are you getting in or not?" he asked.

Not rude. Just unbothered. Detached in a way that made the question feel like it cost him nothing either way.

"Aren't your dad and my mom coming with us?"

"They're taking the wedding car." He nodded toward it — ribbon-covered, glinting under the lights like a joke nobody in the family found funny.

"Oh. Right." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to, more uncertain than I meant to let show.

I opened the back door and slid inside. He didn't follow — instead he took the front passenger seat and said nothing else.

We didn't speak once during the drive. I don't think I breathed properly until the wedding lights had disappeared entirely behind us, swallowed whole by the city. And even then, some part of me was still quietly calculating how far I'd have to run.