Married By Mistake

Chapter Five: Contained

Elena's POV

"He's not my anything," I said, too fast, which was exactly the wrong way to say it.

Carla's eyebrows climbed higher. "Okay."

"He's a friend. We ran into each other. This is a coincidence."

"Sure." She was already reaching for her phone. I knew, with the certainty of eleven years managing this exact personality type, that by the time I got back to the office there would be a story circulating that had nothing to do with the truth and everything to do with what was more interesting.

Jax, to his credit, said nothing until she'd walked far enough to be out of earshot.

"That went well," he said.

"That did not go well."

"On a scale of things that could have happened today, a coworker seeing us drink coffee is pretty low stakes."

"You don't understand this industry. By four o'clock, three people will believe I'm having an affair. One will believe you're my secret twin brother. Someone will ask my mother about it at a luncheon she isn't even invited to."

"That's oddly specific."

"It's happened before. Different scandal."

I left him on the sidewalk with an apology I didn't have time to fully mean, and went straight to the office. Coat still damp. Hair frizzing at the edges from the rain.

Walking those six blocks, I ran through every version of the story I could tell if this actually became a thing. Old friend. College acquaintance. Someone from a past life who happened to be in town.

None of them were true. All of them were easier than the truth.

I walked directly into Priya's line of sight before I'd even made it to my desk.

"So," Priya said, "Carla's telling everyone you have a secret boyfriend."

"I don't have a secret boyfriend."

"That's what I told her. Then I remembered you never came home last night, and your mom showed up unannounced, and now apparently you're holding hands with a stranger outside a coffee shop, and I started to wonder if I was defending something I didn't actually know the truth about."

"You didn't have to defend anything."

"I always defend you, Elena. That's the job description. I just like knowing what I'm defending."

"We weren't holding hands."

"Carla says you were holding hands."

"Carla says a lot of things."

Priya closed the office door. She only does that for two reasons: bad client news, or me being about to lie to her face. Clearly the second one.

"Talk to me," she said. "Not as your assistant. As your best friend since we were twenty-two and you cried in a supply closet because a bride yelled at you over centerpieces."

I sat down heavily in my chair. The florist consult sat blinking on my calendar, unrescheduled. A small red mark of everything I'd let slide today.

I thought about the certificate still folded in my coat pocket. The ten business day wait. Julian's hand tight around mine at lunch. Jax's handwriting, looking like it belonged to someone else entirely.

Four days ago my calendar had my whole life mapped out in fifteen minute blocks, and I'd known exactly who I was inside every single one of them.

Now I couldn't get through an hour without something rearranging itself underneath me.

"I can't tell you," I said. "Not yet. It's not that I don't trust you. It's that if I say it out loud it becomes real in a way I'm not ready for."

"Elena. It's already real. Whatever it is, it already happened. Saying it out loud doesn't make it more true. It just means you're not carrying it alone."

That landed somewhere soft and unguarded. My throat tightened, and it had nothing to do with Carla or gossip or anything I could fix with a well-worded explanation.

"I need more time," I said instead.

Priya studied me for a long moment. The way she studies a floor plan when something isn't adding up. Counting exits. Counting tables. Looking for the seam.

"Okay," she said finally. "I'll run interference on the office rumor mill. Tell people the coffee shop guy's a vendor."

She picked up her tablet, turned toward the door, paused with her hand on the frame, not quite looking back.

"I've known you a long time, Elena. I know what you look like when you're managing a crisis you actually think you can control."

"And?"

"This isn't that face. This is a different face." A beat. "You wore that same face the morning after Marcus dumped you in college. Right before you told me you'd accidentally called him your husband in your sleep for a whole year afterward."

She left before I could answer.

I sat very still at my desk, staring at nothing, because Priya had no way of knowing how close to the truth she'd just landed. Without a single actual fact, she'd said the one word that made my stomach drop straight through the floor.

Husband.

My phone buzzed on the desk in front of me. Jax's name lit up the screen.

Jax: Hey so. My brother just called. He heard about the courthouse thing from someone. Might be a problem.