Married By Mistake

Chapter Nineteen: What My Father Remembered

Elena's POV

My father called before Jax texted back.

"Your mother says you've got yourself a mystery husband," he said, no preamble, the exact same trait I'd apparently inherited from both sides.

"It's not a mystery, Dad. It's a very well documented accident."

"Romero. That the last name?"

My stomach tightened. "Yes."

"I placed it." He said it simply, like he was reporting a weather forecast instead of detonating something. "Piano prodigy. Your mother and I saw him play once, years back, some benefit at the Hendricks estate. Extraordinary. Everyone in that room was talking about how far he'd go."

I sat down slowly on the edge of my bed, phone pressed hard against my ear.

"You're sure it's the same person."

"There aren't many Romeros who play piano like that got talked about at fundraisers, Elena. I did some digging after your mother texted me. There was a whole story a few years later. A breakdown, I think, at some big competition. Then nothing. He just vanished from that world entirely."

Hearing it from him, secondhand and clinical, felt different than hearing it from Jax on a park bench with his own voice shaking. Different, and somehow worse, because it meant the story existed outside the two of us now. Documented. Searchable. Something my father could dig up in an afternoon.

"Does Mom know you found this?"

"I told her an hour ago. She wanted to call you immediately. I told her to let me do it instead, because I thought you might handle it better from me."

That was, unexpectedly, kind of him. My father rarely inserted himself into anything emotional, but when he did, it usually meant he'd actually thought about it first.

"Thanks," I said. "For that."

"Elena. I'm not calling to lecture you. I'm calling because if this story is already circulating photos of the two of you, and if a client is asking to meet him, it's only a matter of time before someone else does exactly what I just did. Types a name into a search bar and finds a decade-old headline."

"I know."

"Does he know that? That people can find this so easily?"

I thought about Jax's face on the courthouse steps. The way he'd looked more frightened by his own honesty than by anything the judge had said. Six years of careful, deliberate invisibility, and here was my own father, unraveling it from an armchair in one afternoon.

"He knows it's possible," I said. "I don't think he knows it's already happening."

"Then maybe you should tell him. Before he hears it from someone less kind than his own future mother-in-law."

The word landed strange. Mother-in-law. Not Julian's mother, who already held that role in every practical sense. My father meant it as a joke, probably, but it sat oddly in my chest anyway, like a door I hadn't noticed was open.

I hung up with my father a few minutes later, promising to call again once things were clearer, which was a promise I had no idea how to keep.

My phone buzzed almost immediately after. Jax, finally.

Jax: Sorry for the radio silence. Got something in my inbox I need to process. Can we talk tonight? Not about the Regina thing. About something else.

I stared at the message, weighing it against everything my father had just told me. He had his own crisis clearly unfolding, whatever it was, and now I had one more thing to add to it.

I typed out three different versions of a reply before landing on the one that felt honest.

Me: My dad remembered you. From a fundraiser years ago. He knows the whole story now, or most of it. I didn't tell him, he found it himself. I think it's only a matter of time before other people do too.

The reply took a while.

Jax: Of course he did. Guess it's finally happening.

Jax: Can we still talk tonight? Feels like a bad week to be alone with all of this.

I looked at that message for a long time, at the quiet, unguarded honesty of it, so different from the deflecting jokes he used with everyone else.

Me: Yes. Come over. I'll figure out what to tell Regina after.

I set the phone down and sat very still in my own apartment, surrounded by a life that had, in the span of two weeks, stopped looking anything like the plan I'd spent years building.