Married By Mistake

Chapter Ten: Family Pressure

Elena's POV

I didn't chase him down the block.

I wanted to, which surprised me more than anything else that had happened in the last four days. But I let him go. Some part of me understood that a man who'd just handed me the one thing he'd spent six years burying wasn't going to want an audience for whatever came next.

I went home instead. Made tea I didn't drink. Sat on my couch and turned his sentence over and over until it stopped sounding real.

I was supposed to be one of the best in the world.

I tried to picture it. Tried to layer that version of him over the one who couldn't keep track of his own car keys. The two images refused to line up into a single person.

My phone rang at seven. My mother's name on the screen. I almost didn't answer, except not answering my mother has never once made the problem smaller.

"You've been avoiding me," she said. No hello. The way she always starts.

"I've been busy, Mom."

"Too busy to call your own mother back after I show up at your apartment worried sick?"

"I told Priya to explain. Vendor emergency."

"I don't believe Priya, and I don't believe you." A pause, the kind she uses like a scalpel. "I want you and Julian for dinner Sunday. Both families. Time we started actually planning this wedding instead of circling around it."

My stomach dropped. Nothing to do with Julian. Everything to do with a marriage certificate still folded in my coat pocket that I hadn't, in four days, found a single moment to mention to her.

"Sunday's tight," I said.

"Elena." Just my name, flat. I heard everything underneath it. The unspoken accusation that I was doing what she always feared I'd do. Letting something slip through my fingers the way she once let her own life slip through hers, publicly, catastrophically, in front of everyone who mattered.

I have one memory that explains most of what I am. I was eleven. My mother stood in our driveway in her best dress while movers carried our furniture out of the house my father could no longer afford. Every neighbor came out onto their porches to watch.

I remember the specific sound of it. The scrape of the couch legs on the pavement. Someone's wind chime going off in the background like nothing was wrong.

She didn't cry. She stood there with her chin up and her hands folded, and let them watch. Because the alternative, going inside, hiding, admitting it had gotten to her, would have been worse than the humiliation itself.

I built my whole life so nobody would ever get to watch me in a driveway like that.

"Sunday works," I said. "We'll be there."

"Good. And Elena, wear the blue dress. Julian's mother likes it."

I hung up and sat with the phone in my lap a long time, staring at nothing. Running the math I always run when the walls start closing in.

If I told Julian about the marriage now, before the annulment cleared, it became a story. A scandal. Something Carla and the whole industry would chew on for months.

If I waited until it was fully dissolved, it became a footnote. Small enough to bury.

The math had always made sense to me before. Tonight it felt like something closer to cowardice.

I've never once thought of myself as a coward. Careful, yes. Controlled, always. But not someone who hides the truth because the truth is inconvenient.

Sitting there with the phone in my lap, I wasn't sure I could keep telling myself that.

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.

I understood that fear better than I wanted to admit. I've spent my whole life making sure nobody ever sees the version of me that isn't fully assembled. And here I was, annoyed at a man for doing the exact same thing I've been doing my entire adult life. Just with better spreadsheets.

I texted him before I could talk myself out of it.

Me: I'm not going to tell anyone. What you said today. It's yours to tell, not mine.

The reply took a long time. Long enough that I set the phone down and picked up my cold tea and made myself a promise not to check it again for at least five minutes.

I checked it in under two.

Jax: Thank you. That actually means a lot. Can we talk tomorrow? Somewhere that isn't a courthouse.

I typed back yes before I'd fully thought through what I was agreeing to.

Then I sat there in my quiet apartment, staring at that single word on the screen, and understood, with the sudden clarity of a woman who plans everything and had planned none of this, that I was in a great deal more trouble than a marriage certificate could account for.