Married By Mistake

Chapter Thirteen: What Julian Heard

Elena's POV

"What did you just say?"

I made myself repeat it. "I got married. By accident. The night of the party, before I came home. I don't even remember most of it."

Six days of careful phrasing, and it still came out sounding worse than I'd rehearsed it.

Julian didn't move. Didn't raise his voice. That was somehow worse than if he had.

"To him." He tipped his head toward the far gate, where Jax had stopped walking and was standing frozen, too far to hear the words but close enough to see exactly what was happening.

"Yes."

"You've been married to another man for six days, and you let me set up a joint account. Let me apologize for the account, like I was the one who'd done something wrong."

"I was trying to fix it before it became a bigger problem than it needed to be."

"By hiding it from me."

"By handling it," I said, and even as I said it I heard how much it sounded like something he'd say. "I filed for an annulment the same morning. I've been to that courthouse three times this week."

I watched him absorb that. Waited for it to soften something in his face. It didn't.

Julian was quiet for a long moment, studying me with an expression I couldn't fully read, calm on the surface, something colder moving underneath.

"You could have told me," he said. "That first morning. Instead you let me plan around a lie for a week."

"I was scared of exactly this. Of you looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm a liability you're already calculating how to manage."

Something flickered across his face, there and gone, and I knew I'd landed closer to the truth than he wanted me to.

"I'm not managing you, Elena. I'm trying to understand how the woman I'm about to marry ended up legally bound to someone else and decided the smart move was to keep it from me."

"I panicked."

"You don't panic. That's what I love about you." His voice had gone soft now, almost gentle, and that shift unsettled me more than the anger would have. "You plan. You control. You don't let things slip. Which makes me wonder what actually happened that night, and why some part of you decided a stranger deserved the truth before I did."

I didn't have an answer for that. Not one I was ready to say out loud, not with Jax standing thirty feet away, not with my own heart doing something complicated and unfamiliar every time I thought about the answer.

A week ago I would have had an answer ready before he finished the question. That used to be my whole skill set. Having the answer ready.

"This doesn't have to be a disaster," Julian said. "We handle it quietly. You finish the annulment, we push the wedding date if we need breathing room, and none of this ever has to touch anyone outside this park."

"You want to just erase it."

"I want to protect what we've built. Is that so unreasonable?"

"It happened, Julian. I can't erase six days just because they're inconvenient."

"Inconvenient." He repeated the word like it tasted wrong. "Is that what this is to you? An inconvenience? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like something you've been protecting."

"I'm not protecting anything. I'm trying to fix a mistake."

"Then fix it. Quickly. That's all I'm asking."

His jaw tightened, the first real crack I'd seen in his composure all conversation. "Then what exactly are you asking me for? Permission to keep seeing him while you figure out your feelings?"

"That's not what I said."

"It's what I'm hearing." He stepped closer, voice dropping lower, more careful, more controlled than ever. "I'll give you until the wedding is officially announced to get this handled. Fully handled, Elena. Annulment finalized, no more coffee, no more parks, no more him."

"And if I need more time than that?"

Julian looked past me one more time, toward Jax, and something settled into his expression that looked less like jealousy and more like a decision already made.

"Then we'll have a very different conversation about what kind of future we're actually planning together."

He turned and walked back the way he'd come without waiting for me to answer. I stood there in the middle of the path, the fountain still not working behind me, and realized my hands were shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

I'd finally told the truth, and somehow it had only made the ground under me feel less steady than the lie ever had.