The Merger Clause

Chapter Two: Ten Years Ago

Wren didn't cry in the car, which she considered a personal victory, and didn't cry in the elevator either, which was a smaller one. She made it all the way to the parking garage before she let herself lean against the cold concrete pillar and just breathe.

Ten years ago, this building hadn't existed. Ten years ago, the Vanes and the Calloways had shared a lake house every August, and Sebastian had been the serious older brother who taught her to sail, and his younger brother Rhys had been the one who made her laugh so hard she fell out of the boat.

Ten years ago, none of them could have imagined a contract like the one in her bag.

She didn't remember the exact day the friendship ended. That was the strange part. There'd been a slow freeze, adults speaking in careful, clipped sentences at events, invitations that stopped arriving, a lake house sold to strangers. By the time she was sixteen the Vanes were simply gone from her life, replaced by a silence nobody explained.

She'd asked her mother once, years later, what happened. Her mother had said, "Business," in the tone that meant the conversation was over before it started.

Wren pushed off the pillar and made herself walk to her car. She had ninety days and no idea, yet, that the hardest part wasn't going to be Sebastian at all.

She found out about Rhys three days later, from her sister, who delivered the news the way Isla delivered most news, which was with maximum drama and minimum warning.

"He's back," Isla said, dropping onto the end of Wren's bed without invitation. "Rhys Vane. I saw him at the coffee place on Ninth. He looks like he stepped out of a cologne ad. It's genuinely unfair."

Wren kept her eyes on her laptop screen, on a spreadsheet she was no longer reading. "Why is he back."

"Something about their father. He's sick, apparently. Really sick." Isla studied her sister's face with the specific attentiveness of a younger sibling who had spent years learning to read her. "You okay?"

"I'm marrying his brother in less than ninety days, Isla. Define okay."

"That's not what I asked."

Wren closed the laptop. There was no pretending to work through this particular conversation. "I loved him," she said, quiet, like saying it too loud might make it truer than she wanted it to be. "Before everything. I loved Rhys Vane and then he just left, no note, no explanation, and I spent about two years being furious about it and about eight years pretending I wasn't still furious."

"And now he's back in town the same month you're marrying his brother."

"Yes."

"That's either the worst timing in the history of timing," Isla said, "or God is writing a soap opera and we're all just in it."

Wren almost laughed, which was more than she'd managed in days. "Don't say that to Mom. She'll want to know which one of them has better prospects."

"She'd pick Sebastian. Obviously. He has a building with his name on it."

"Rhys has a building with his name on it too. It's just in London."

Isla raised an eyebrow. "You looked that up."

"I did not."

"Wren."

"I may have looked that up."

Her sister grinned, delighted, and didn't push further, which was its own kind of mercy. But long after Isla left, Wren sat with the knowledge sitting heavy in her chest: the two Vane brothers, back in her life in the same season, for entirely different reasons, and only one of them she was contractually required to marry.

She wasn't sure yet which fact scared her more.