REJECTED BRIDE

CHAPTER 3

Chapter 3

I never answer the text.

I tuck the fear away and go on with my days, because there's nothing else to do with it. Fear is like a bad tenant. If you can't evict it, you learn to live around it.

Three weeks after the gala photos, the invitation arrives. It doesn't come by phone. It comes in a stiff cream envelope that Odile carries in with the morning post, holding it away from her body like it might be contagious.

Inside:

Isabelle Rousseau requests the pleasure of your company at a small family gathering to celebrate the engagement of Adrien Rousseau and Céline Delacroix.

I read it twice, to be sure I'm not imagining the cruelty of it. I'm not. My name isn't even on the card. It's only on the envelope. Somebody wanted to make sure I saw it, without going to the trouble of pretending I was welcome.

I almost don't go. I really do.

Then I think of Isabelle's voice in that hospital hallway, and a stubborn little voice of my own says: If you're going to be talked about as an absence, show up as a presence.

I call Adrien. "Did you know about this invitation?"

A pause. "Maman insisted. She said it would look strange if you weren't included at all, given..."

"Given that I'm still your fiancée," I finish for him.

"Margot..."

"I'll be there." I hang up before he can talk me out of it.

• • •

The Rousseau house smells like lilies and old money. Every hallway has a step my chair can't manage alone, so a staff member wheels me the long way, through the kitchen, to reach the drawing room. It's a route built for deliveries, not guests. I know exactly what kind of guest I've been filed under before I even get there.

I hear them before I see them. The door is ajar.

"...can't seriously expect her to keep coming to these things." Céline. Light and amused. "It's a bit morbid, Isabelle. Like inviting a ghost to your wedding."

Laughter.

"She did save his life, to be fair," says a man. A cousin, maybe.

"And we're all very grateful," Céline says. "But gratitude and marriage are different things. You don't marry the fire department because they put out your house."

More laughter. Warmer this time.

Isabelle, dry as toast: "She's earned a place at the table. Just not the seat at the head of it."

"Show us, Céline," someone says. "Do the thing you did last week."

I go very still. My hand tightens on the armrest.

Céline gives a fake little laugh. "Oh, I really shouldn't..."

"Go on."

A pause. The rustle of someone getting into position. Then, in a breathy, wounded voice: "Adrien... help me, I can't feel my legs..."

The room explodes. I can hear Isabelle laughing too. Unmistakable.

Then something worse. Adrien's voice, low and easy:

"Okay, okay. That's enough."

Enough. Not stop. Not how dare you. It's the tone you'd use on a puppy that has jumped up too high. Fond. Mildly annoyed. Nothing more.

I push the door open myself.

The laughter dies in stages as people notice me, like lights going off down a hallway. Céline, hand still pressed to her chest in mid-performance, turns and sees me. She goes pale. Not from shame. From getting caught. I know the difference. I've watched a lot of people get caught.

"Margot." Adrien is already on his feet, crossing the room, his face arranging itself into practiced concern. "You made it. I didn't hear the door."

"Clearly," I say.

Céline recovers first, of course. "Margot! It's a silly game, nothing serious, I hope you don't..."

"I heard all of it," I say, level. "From the hallway. Every word."

Isabelle sets her glass down with a small click. "Then you understand it was all in good fun. No one here is unkind. We're simply realistic about circumstances."

"Realistic," I repeat.

"You saved my son's life. No one disputes that." Her tone is smooth and rehearsed. "But a marriage isn't a debt to be repaid. It's a life built in public, in front of people who will judge my son by the woman standing beside him. Even you can understand that a chair changes what's possible."

Nobody in the room will look at me except Céline. She meets my eyes steadily, with the calm of a woman who has already won and is only waiting for everyone else to catch up.

I look at Adrien.

He's the one person here who owes me a single sentence. This is my fiancée, and this stops now. I threw myself in front of a truck for him without half a second's hesitation. I'm not asking for anything nearly that hard. I'm only asking him to open his mouth.

He opens it.

"Let's not do this here," he says. "Everyone's emotions are running a little high."

Everyone's emotions. As if their cruelty and my reaction to it are the same kind of weather.

I laugh. One short, humorless breath. Then I release my own wheel brake before anyone can offer to help.

"Don't," I say, when he reaches for the handles. "I know the way out. I came in through the kitchen. I can leave through it too."

• • •

Here's the problem with making a dramatic exit from a house with a service entrance: you have to wait for the car.

My driver is ten minutes away. So I wait in the servants' corridor, between a rack of coats and a very judgmental potted palm, while Adrien's footsteps pound past the end of the hall toward the front door. He doesn't look down the corridor. Of course he doesn't. He looks where he expects to find me. Somewhere grand.

Behind me, nobody has thought to close the drawing room door. Nobody thinks about the corridor at all. That's sort of the point of a servants' corridor.

"Well," Céline says, and laughs. "That was dramatic."

"Can you blame her?" the cousin says. He doesn't sound convinced.

"I do, actually." I hear the clink of a glass. "We were having fun. She didn't have to make it about her."

Isabelle sighs. "This is exactly the problem. Adrien indulges her, and now she thinks she can make scenes wherever she likes."

"She did save his life, Isabelle," the cousin tries again, quieter.

"And I have said, more than once, that we are grateful." Isabelle's voice snaps like a dry twig. "Gratitude does not mean I watch my son's future unravel because a girl in a wheelchair can't accept that some things aren't meant to last. He got engaged to her out of guilt. Guilt is not a foundation. It never was."

"Poor Adrien," Céline says, in a voice made entirely of sympathy and none of the feeling. "Stuck choosing between the woman he's supposed to marry and the one everyone expects him to pity forever."

"He'll come around," Isabelle says, flat and certain. "Give him a week to feel guilty, and he'll see reason again."

"And if he doesn't?" the cousin asks.

There's a pause. I can picture her looking at the door Adrien went out through.

"Then I suppose," Isabelle says, "we'll have to help him see it."

Headlights sweep across the end of the corridor. My driver.

Through the back window, as we pull away, I see Adrien burst out the front door into the gravel drive, calling my name to nobody.

• • •

I don't cry on the ride home.

I think about Céline's voice doing the impression. I think about the fact that I genuinely, physically, cannot feel my legs, and that it was the funniest thing in that room. I think about eleven photographs from a gala. A bracelet still unopened in a box. A man who watched a room mock the worst thing that ever happened to me and asked, mildly, for everyone's emotions to settle down.

By the time the car reaches my building, something inside me has gone very quiet and very clear.

Then my phone lights up in my lap. Odile. She's calling from my own apartment, and her voice is tight and fast the moment I pick up.

"Madame, I'm so sorry to bother you tonight, but there's someone here. A woman. She says she's the Rousseau family's lawyer. She's been waiting almost an hour. She says it can't wait until morning."